My Summer Without Social Media

There is a slip of paper hidden in my phone case, worn soft and wrinkled, that I have carried since January of this year. On December 21st, as part of an experiment with Paganism, I wrote down 13 wishes/intentions for 2026 on torn notebook paper. Over the next 12 days, I burned all but one of them in an artificial apple-scented candle. The final scrap of paper, left unburned, is supposed to be a goal you work towards throughout the rest of the year. I was determined for this to ring true for my little six-word mantra. 

“I read instead of doomscrolling.” 

At the time, social media had its hooks deep in my life, and I hated it. Scrolling Instagram or (and I’m sorry) YouTube shorts took up more of my life than I cared to admit. For months, I had been trying my best, but I couldn’t break my habit. This was one more in a long list of attempted solutions.

Okay, the goal was for the whole year. That didn’t happen. But from finals week through August 25th, I truly did not open “the socials”. Here are my takeaways. 

Genuine Withdrawals 

The first day was the worst. I deleted Instagram, removed YouTube from my saved tabs, and took the Google app off my homescreen. For half an hour, I felt wonderful. And then I got bored. I realized I had no idea what to do with myself. I was burnt out at the end of the semester and not in the mood to do much of anything. This was the sort of time that doomscrolling was made for! It honestly shocked me to realize just how dependent I had become on constant stimulation. This feeling wouldn’t go away for weeks, but it faded a bit over the next few days. 

FOMO

Friends

This was to be expected, but it was still a struggle at first. I felt out of the loop and frustrated because I was supposed to be connecting with the world! Even though in the beginning I was very in the dark about what was going on with anyone, I didn’t see much in real life. It soon occurred to me that this was not a bad thing. It meant that if there was a person whose life I was genuinely curious about, I could text them or arrange to meet in person, and I always came away from those interactions feeling more socially fulfilled than I ever did just double tapping a like on their post.

Current Events

I never got all my information from social media (give me more credit than that), but a large chunk of it? Absolutely. And even though part of the reason I wanted to ditch social meda was because of the depressive dive my mental health took whenever I read the next terrible world event, I didn’t want to be completely uninformed. So, despite an attention span damaged by thirty second clips, I forced myself to start reading real articles if someone mentioned the latest in the great crisis that is the news of today (probably more reliable than what Instagram was giving me anyway). 

Replacing the Scroll (Good and Bad) 

Confession: I couldn’t go fully cold turkey. Instead, I turned to the Google app. Google generates a list of articles it thinks you might be interested in when you open the app, and this became my scrolling fix. So what’s the point of giving up Instagram if you’re still going to be staring at little attention-grabbing headings on a screen, you ask? Well, to be perfectly honest, I got bored with Google’s suggestions a lot faster than I ever did with Instagram’s. My attention span for these articles was usually no more than ten minutes. And even if I spent five or ten minutes staring at the ceiling because I couldn’t think of anything to do if I wasn’t scrolling, then at least I was in my own thoughts, not anyone else’s. I found other ways to replace the scroll that weren’t related to my phone, too, and I ended up reading more books than I have in the past two years.

Basically… 

Over time, it got easier and easier not to pick up my phone whenever there was downtime to fill. My instinct to reach for Instagram in particular faded somewhat but never went away completely. Even after a month without social media, the thought of just how easy it would be to pop right back was never far from my mind whenever I felt the dull threat of boredom creeping in. But the goal was not necessarily to remove myself from social media forever—just to make sure it wasn’t always my first instinct.

And I think I managed that. Last summer, I felt more present in my life than I had in a long time. Even though, as the school year has resumed, I’ve yielded to the odd scrolling sesh now and again, I’ve spent nowhere near the amount of hours online as I did this time last year. Ultimately, I am able to say with certainty that when I look back at my summer, I did not waste it on Instagram and YouTube. 

So would I do this again? Absolutely.

• #experiment
• #goals
• #mental health
• #social media
• #summer