Why you should delete TikTok from your phone

After weeks of contemplation, I finally built up the strength to fight back against my addiction to TikTok. I deleted the app, and I hope it remains deleted from my phone. After calculations, I determined I spend approximately 60 hours a month on TikTok. That is two hours a day… every day.

After having the app deleted from my phone for a week now, I realized how much I have been able to accomplish. I have been getting schoolwork done, reading more, and my screentime has significantly dropped. 

I encourage everyone to try, for at least one day, to delete the app. It feels freeing to be released from the shackles of TikTok, a prison of rabbit holes, instant gratification, and doomscrolling.

Let me explain why a world outside of TikTok is free and exhilarating, but first, let’s look at the scientific background.

According to an article shared on NIH National Library of Medicine titled “Exploring Problematic TikTok Use and Mental Health Issues: A Systematic Review of Empirical Studies,” they determined the problematic ways of TikTok and the impact on mental health. They discovered frequent use of TikTok was closely linked with an increase in symptoms of anxiety and depression, most commonly in users under the age of 24. It is also especially common for female users to experience problematic TikTok use, with 67.3% of problematic cases found within female university students. 

Moreover, a study conducted by the Behavioral Sciences Journal recruited 43 young adults, aged 18 to 30, to delete all social media from their phones for two weeks. Throughout the experiment, the researchers found that deleting social media can increase sleep duration and quality, enhance moods, productivity, and confidence, nurture mindful eating behaviors, alongside many other benefits. 

Alongside this, TikTok can easily perpetuate a harmful body image. TikTok can contribute to competitive appearance comparisons, causing problems to your own mental health and body image. Research links TikTok to negative body image perceptions, eating disorders, and problematic diet culture.

Following this, in 2021, The Wall Street Journal published an investigation demonstrating 100 automated TikTok bot accounts, with assigned interests like “yoga” or “forestry” that were not shared with the apps. The bots were programmed to watch videos related to their topic of interest. Within just a few hours, the TikTok algorithm picked up on what every single bot was assigned and filled their TikTok feeds with only that content. In one occurrence, a bot was assigned the interest of “sadness” and “depression” and its TikTok feed shortly became 93% filled with videos about sadness, mental health struggles, and self-harm. 

This phenomenon is what we commonly know as “rabbit holing,” in which the TikTok algorithm picks up on a general interest, shows you popular content from that interest, but soon turns to remote corners of the app. In these “remote corners,” the content is less popular and less likely to be flagged by the app’s moderation system; thus, the content is more likely to be dangerous and spread harmful information. 

Like many others, I was trapped in the addiction of “doom scrolling,” which is obsessively consuming content about topics that make you feel bad, or consuming negative news online. Platforms like TikTok uniquely tailor the “For You” page to be content you are interested in, whether it’s negative or positive. Since the content is in such short forms, spanning from five seconds to minute-long videos, it is easy to get stuck in the trap of spending hours scrolling, not realizing how much time has passed. According to Brown University, users spend an average of 46 minutes on the app per day, opening it eight times daily; considering the average length of a video being 15 seconds, users watch an average of 180 videos per day on average. The infinite scroll and reward pattern of TikTok likely increases how addictive it can be, creating a distorted sense of time. 

 If you notice yourself in a particular bad mood or feeling negative in your mental health, check what you are consuming on TikTok because that could be the problem causing your issues. 

Similarly, TikTok provides users with instant gratification, with short-form videos, a “For You” page designed specifically for you, and dopamine-releasing features from likes, shares, and comments. Thus, ‘likes’ are gratifying in multiple ways; it feels good to receive likes from other people, as well as to give likes to other people. For both forms of this gratification, the presence of the like button provides instant gratification, driving habitual use and addiction through positive reinforcement. 

TikTok addiction is the combination of all of these effects, and by deleting the app, you can free your mind from the detrimental damage TikTok causes. After deleting the app, I have spent more time focusing on school, chatting with friends, reading, and enjoying life outside of my phone. 

Although TikTok can be beneficial in some ways by providing information and allowing people to connect virtually through shared interests and common traits, it is also important to take a step back and consider how much time you are spending on the app. So take a moment and consider deleting the app, even for a short period of time, and allow yourself to see the world without TikTok.