A Social Detox
Illustrated on Procreate
As a digital native, the use of my phone, computer, iPad, etc, is a habitual practice for me. Even before I had an iPhone, I had an iPod, which allowed me to do almost everything from Instagram to FaceTime. Even though I have grown up in this digital world, I have always had an awareness of its consequences. I have tried in the past to limit my use of Instagram, as for me, it is the app I am most addicted to. I made my first Instagram in 2012 and used it until about 2014. At that point, I deleted the app, because I didn’t like how much time I was spending on it. Unfortunately, while living in a world surrounded by all of my peers who had an account, I constantly felt like I was missing out on information, new memes, and general trending topics that everyone would be talking about. After a year or two of this, I made a new Instagram account in 2016. For me, it was not only fear of missing out, that was an issue, but also this general unawareness of trending topics or videos that everyone else knew about that finally drove me to make another account. After I made this new account I found I was trying to make content for it constantly and there was always this new stress of finding the perfect time to post, or the perfect caption, and everything that goes along with the workings of social media. I was posting so much and finding I was so stressed out by it that I would typically fill my page during the year and never post in the summer months. I just needed time to decompress and my summers were typically packed and busy, making social media something I just couldn’t take the time to worry about. Now, I find that I post less and am not as stressed about making sure I have enough content making it timely, but I am still using the app, and other social media apps as well, way more than I would like to be.
In Jean M. Twenge’s article, Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?, many intriguing comparisons are made between my generation and previous generations, many of which may be linked to our use of smartphones and technology. In fact, it has been found that “Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35% more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan,” and are also “more likely to get less than seven hours of sleep.” The impacts of this are severe and sleep, especially teens, is so important. “Fifty-seven percent more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991.” As someone who averaged a 5-6 hour night of sleep in high school, I know first hand the consequences that sleep deprivation can cause.
With all of this in mind, I decided to do a “social detox” of my number one enemy….Instagram. This detox involved five days of not using Instagram at all, no posting, no consuming, no notifications, not even opening the app. In the past, when I have stopped posting in the summers, I still consumed the content. This detox is different, by prohibiting my use of the app completely.
To start, I looked at my screen time use on my phone, to get a sense of what apps I was using the most and for how long. My daily average of screen time ranged from 4.5 hours to 5.5 hours, with Instagram being the most used app ranging from an hour to an hour and a half per day and sometimes more than that. In comparison, I had only used Snapchat for about 15-30 min per day. Otherwise, the other biggest consumer of my screen time was my messages app. Coming in at the lowest times were Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, all averaging under 10 min for the whole week, about a minute per day.
During the detox, I found that I ended up spending time on a lot of these other apps that I hadn’t spent time on before. I noticed I was using Pinterest more, as well as Snapchat, and even just scrolling through my camera roll. There were many times that I had the urge to open the app, but the longer I was away from it, the less I felt I needed to use it.
In the end, I looked back again and my overall average screen time did decrease to about 4 hours per day. Although, I don’t know if this was entirely due to me not using Instagram, or other factors, such as an overly busy schedule. As for the other apps I used, I did notice a big jump, as Snapchat doubled to an average of 45 min a day and Pinterest around 15 min a day.
I would like to decrease my overall social media usage, I am just not sure cutting it all off is the way to go. I think it is still important to see content and be a part of the social conversation, without being consumed by it. Even though I will go back to using Instagram, I do want to hold in mind the idea of boundaries and limiting my screen time. While monitoring my usage, I saw that there were ways to set app limits and downtime, along with other ways to help manage your screen usage. I think it would be interesting and maybe helpful to try them out and see what changes occur.
Sources:
Twenge, Jean M. “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 19 Mar. 2018, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/.
