The realm of social media has brought us immense exposure to new ways of capturing the moments of life, broader horizons and understanding of culture, and advanced capabilities for communication and self expression. A little handheld box bursting with creativity, influence, and resources has changed our world forever. While social media has brought us amazing ways of communicating and expressing a wide range of ideas, it has also brought us distractions, comparison, inauthenticity, and heightened insecurities. This is why detoxing from social media is so important for our overall physical, emotional, and especially mental health. Detoxing from social media does not suggest deleting social media altogether, but instead refers to a process or period of time where you take a break from social media platforms to recenter yourself and your priorities. I have found that detoxing from these platforms has increased my overall outlook on my life, my goals, and myself. Here are four critical ways detoxing from social media benefits our lives:
- Increases Productivity
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Social media can be filled with endless swipes and searches that quickly transform into endless minutes which add up to be endless hours. Morning Consult conducted a survey in November 2022 that reported how many hours daily Gen Z Americans used social media. The survey found that more than half of the participants spent a minimum of four hours a day on social media platforms.^1 Time management, especially as a college student, is a huge contributor to not only excelling in academics, but also in achieving personal goals and growth. Oftentimes social media can eat up a significant amount of our time. It can also be said that social media probably should not be one of the main priorities in life unless it relates to plans to make it your future career. Our main priorities in life should be our health, our relationships, our degrees, our passions, and what positive impacts we aspire to make on the communities around us. The key to productivity is discipline and discipline is cultivated in the little choices we make every day. If time management is a struggle for you due to social media, then some beneficial tips are to set an alarm for the time you will spend on social media or staying off all platforms completely for designated times of the day or even specific days of the week. Detoxing from social media is a form of taking back the time in our days to actually accomplish our tasks and goals.
- Increases Gratitude
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We live in a world of instant gratification. You can binge watch every season of your favorite show whenever you want, you can have your groceries delivered to your front door, you can download or stream music within seconds, the greatest search bar is at your fingertips, and the list goes on. There’s always some new, faster way of doing things. Don’t get me wrong, efficiency is great; however, efficiency is completely different from haste. We live a fast paced life and sometimes it’s refreshing to simply slow things down and declutter our minds. Taking a break from social media allows us to be more present without constantly seeing filtered parts of life and thinking about what kind of image of our own lives we want to present to people. We become more grateful when we are more present. We become more grateful when we’re not constantly being fed images of other people’s lives. Staying present and practicing gratitude decreases comparison and even envy. For certain people, social media can be a gateway to FOMO, discontentment, and comparison. What this social media detox does is reset our minds to be more appreciative of the little things and more content with those around us and ourselves.
- Increases Authenticity
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Filters are a part of social media for a reason. They can offer creative editing for a wide range of aesthetics, but they also offer facial editing tools. We’re able to create a “more desirable” or “more put together” version of ourselves. We can write trendy captions, add filters, crop photos, and choose how much we want to share from our lives as well as which parts to share. When it comes to social media, we’re in the driver’s seat…until we aren’t. It’s a slippery slope when it comes to constantly consuming the “highlights” of people’s lives–whether they’re strangers or friends. Your mind can start to think that social media is people’s real lives, when in reality, social media is just a nicely tailored presentation of the snippets of real life. The truth is that social media will never be fully raw or real–it wasn’t designed to be. Living life, breathing, experiences, personal progress, relationships with others are what is raw and real. Detoxing from social media allows us to simply live out every aspect of our lives without the subconscious comparison to a filtered one.
- Increases Self Esteem
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Social media gives us infinite exposure to pretty much everything–every trend, every ideology, every societal standard, every hobby, and every story. It’s a blessing and a curse. In some ways, social media has poured salt onto our wounds and has emboldened our inner critics. The truth is that everything that you consume impacts you to some degree and in some way. Books you’ve read, songs you’ve listened to, shows you’ve watched, class you’ve taken, and conversations you’ve had have all impacted you whether we acknowledge it or not. Some impact us more than others and some impact us positively or negatively. Social media is something that we constantly or habitually consume. So, think about the impact it has on us. That voice of your inner critic that tells you how you should be living your life, what you should be doing, what you shouldn’t be doing, what x,y or z is supposed to look like gets louder on social media. When talking with friends of mine, we can all own the fact that social media has impacted our self esteem in some way, shape, or form at some point in our lives. It’s not always constant, but sometimes it likes to pop up on certain days and make you not feel “good enough” in some area. Detoxing from social media increases self esteem because you aren’t consumed with thoughts about how you are perceived on these platforms or how others around you are perceived. It takes the focus off of this performance habit and onto working on yourself for yourself.
If you are to take anything away from this article, it is to be intentional with how you use social media platforms and be honest about the various ways they might affect you and when you need a break. Personally, I have found that detoxing from social media for a few hours, a day or a week has not only increased my productivity, gratitude, authenticity, and self-esteem but has also shifted the way I view and use the apps moving forward. It grants you a fresh perspective of who you are and how you wish to express that on social media. The last thing we want is to be people who are crucially dependent on social media for entertainment, validation, or even guidance. These platforms are there for us to enjoy, but they cannot be the core foundations of who we are and what we think.
^1 Briggs, E. (2022, December 13). Gen Z is extremely online. Morning Consult. Retrieved January 14, 2023, from https://morningconsult.com/2022/12/12/gen-z-social-media-usage/
