When I ask my friends if they are addicted to TikTok I usually receive one of two responses, a laugh or instantaneous denial…
It was the beginning of December 2020 (after watching the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma”) when I began routinely checking my screen time and noticing scary high numbers. My average per day was anywhere from nine to eleven hours! Out of curiosity I did the math for the past month and discovered exactly how many 24 hour days I had “missed” stuck in my phone. This is what scared me. I began thinking that if this continues for the rest of my life, I will eventually have missed out on years worth of reality. TikTok was my culprit for the bulk of this virtual consumption when I checked the broken-down diagnostics of each app. After that discovery, I began to notice how much later at night I stayed up by scrolling and forgetting about time staying up till three or four in the morning. I would open the app and get sucked in when I otherwise should have been completing an assignment or studying (I’m sure all who still have the app can relate to what I am saying). I didn’t know it before, but TikTok had completely consumed my life. I have anxiety and panic disorder and in monitoring my instincts to go on the app, I noticed I used it as an anxiety escape. Whenever I felt anxious, rather than facing it I would go on TikTok. You cannot deny that it completely distracts your brain and essentially takes you out of reality. This app became a way to avoid facing my very real mental health issues.
I needed to make a change! The first week home for winter break, I did. I deleted TikTok. It wasn’t easy quitting like I had imagined it would be. I observed my mood and tracked my anxiety and everything was out of whack. I noted panicky behavior, restlessness, paranoia, and heightened anxiety levels. It was awful. I was truly experiencing phone addiction withdrawal. It was winter break so I would have been sitting around on my phone which I was now trying to avoid. Because of this, I began to fill my time with alternative activities to try and overcome these withdrawal symptoms I was legitimately experiencing. I ordered a book to read FOR FUN to fill this time. I hadn’t read for pleasure since middle school and forgot how much I loved it. Over winter break I read three 400+ paged novels with all of this extra time! I probably spent just as much time reading as would have spent scrolling. My screen time had dropped to just around 2-3 hours a day and my head felt more clear. After the second week of this, I felt a significant improvement in the symptoms I was experiencing.
I was so fascinated by what I had just gone through (although it was not enjoyable). I wondered if my associating these symptoms with deleting TikTok were accurate or just in my head. I took to the internet and did a little digging and what I found was kind of unreal. I found an article from a legit source titled “TikTok Ban: How Suddenly Being Cut off of Social Media Apps Affects Mental Health”. The article talked about the ban of the app in various countries and people’s immediate behavioral responses to this ban. Vivek Ullati, a psychiatrist stated in the article, “Social media apps like TikTok use the same neural pathways in your brain as alcohol, nicotine, and cannabis…When you use a drug, your brain gets conditioned to it because pleasure pathways in the brain release dopamine, which is a hormone that makes us feel rewarded…That feeling of reward creates what we call a ‘high.’” Dr. Manoj Kumar Sharma of the National Institute of Mental Health & Neurological Sciences stated, “‘They’ll be panicky, irritated, angry and sad, with constant mood swings.’” This doctor specializes in young adult technological addiction studies. TikTok strategically implements ways to get its users hooked in a loop of swiping for hours on end (Parthshri Arora). It was all making more sense and I felt better that what I had experienced was legitimate and scientifically backed up.
If you have made it to this point in the article, I thank you for spending this last minute or so reading instead of on TikTok. I now challenge you to break the addiction you probably don’t think you have by deleting it! We should all spend more time together in physical reality and not sucked into our little screens. It has been 70 days and I have not re-downloaded the app since. You can do it too!
