I was watching a couple of videos about people deleting social media off of their phones that were recommended to me on YouTube and I came to the epiphany that I was addicted to my phone and more importantly, social media. I have always been good about setting a timer for my social media apps on my phone to only allow two hours of social media per day. Of course, there’s also an option to extend that time by 15 minutes or ignore the timer overall. I found myself constantly hitting the 15-minute button before I was even a third of the way through my day. I realized that I had an even bigger problem when I would close out of my social media apps only to open them back up a few seconds later to mindlessly scroll through the same things that I’ve already seen. Watching the YouTube videos of other’s epiphanies was what pushed me to finally delete social media apps off of my phone. My brain was constantly processing data from what I was scrolling through and I found that it made me absent-minded, lose focus and even more impatient.
It’s only been a week and a half since I’ve deleted social media off of my phone, but in that time frame, I’ve found that I could focus more on assignments that I had and finished them in less time than I would have with Instagram on my phone. More importantly, I didn’t feel the urge to have my phone in my hands at all times or feel the need to check my phone every time I thought I had a notification. I found that I had time to read the two books that I had sitting on my nightstand for the past half a year. When I had the urge to look at my social media pages, I would just scroll through Instagram or Facebook on the web browser version. By doing this, looking at pictures actually became less interesting and there was less of a tendency to want to revisit the page.
So why is social media so addicting? One of the videos I watched about deleting social media was from Casey Neistat talking about social media addiction. He mentioned how algorithms were the reason for our tendency to be addicted to platforms such as Instagram, which is the platform that I had the biggest issue with. The social media algorithm causes the user to spend more time on their phones by curating posts based on your likes. The more information that you give them by liking posts, the more you’re allowing yourself to be sucked into a social media addiction.
I’m sure that there are many people out there who are on the same boat as me who have come to the same epiphany but haven’t had the courage to delete the apps. I strongly encourage those of you who have been thinking about it to just do it. Then you can have time to do things that you’ve been meaning to do and clear your mind from all of the information you’re constantly scrolling through.
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