I feel like deleting or spending less time on social media is always a goal that people make, but it can be so hard to stick to. Good in theory, hard in practice. And I speak from experience, because it’s always one of my many New Year’s resolutions, and it’s always one that doesn’t work out.
But I had a realization the other day that I literally couldn’t remember a single Tik Tok that I had watched in the last 24 hours (and I had been on my phone for at least 2 hours). I realized I was literally sitting there and wasting hours of my time, and I felt so dumb for it.
So I finally committed, and I deleted the TikTok app off of my phone.
It hasn’t been a life changing decision; I didn’t just suddenly land my dream internship or anything after deleting it (I wish). But I think I have noticed some changes, and they’ve literally all been positive. And even though some small positive change can feel minute, when a bunch of those changes add up it can really feel like a huge difference.
The first positive thing to come out of deleting TikTok is that I’ve been sleeping better. I know that we’re all guilty of the late-night (typically hours long) TikTok doom-scrolling. I always said that it would just make me tired and help me fall asleep, but it was definitely doing the exact opposite of that.
And once I deleted the app, I finally realized that. Instead of scrolling, I started reading before I fell asleep, and I started falling asleep in 15 minutes rather than hours. It made such a huge difference, and I’ve been waking up feeling much more energized and well-rested.
Another positive thing that I noticed was that I was finishing a lot of my homework way faster than normal. Instead of taking breaks to answer my texts and then scroll TikTok, I was just answering some texts, so my breaks ended up being way shorter. I was finishing things faster, which, when added up, made a huge difference in my schedule.
I always thought I was just bad at time management, but I think it was simply the fact that I was spending too much time on my phone.
Those have been the two biggest things that I’ve noticed so far, but they’ve both been making such big changes in me that it was totally worth it to delete the app. And I’m sure more benefits are going to pop up later, so I’m looking forward to figuring those things out.
But, I will not lie, it has not always been easy. I have definitely spent some time on Instagram Reels recently. But it just doesn’t feel the same, so I’ve honestly stopped using that as well. It’s kind of nice to be on my phone less; it has definitely been helping me out. So I would recommend just trying it out, even for a day. I promise that once you go without it for a while, you’ll realize you never really needed it in the first place.