I am ten days into a social media cleanse, and I am thriving.
I didn’t initially think that it would be very easy. I had prepared myself for withdrawals, resigned to suffer through my 21-day social media cleanse, and emerge on the other side crawling to the finish line, overwhelmed with relief that I could finally rejoin (digital) society. But now…?
I’m starting to wonder if I really want to go back.
It all started with the Screen Time app on my iPhone. Have you ever taken a hard look at your screen time? Somehow a live screenshot of my Screen Time app is pinned to my home page right below my current location on the map and the local weather forecast, and I don’t know how to remove it. RUDE.
And I really couldn’t believe some of the numbers that I was seeing there on a regular basis. Hours spent doom-scrolling Facebook each day? That couldn’t possibly be right. More daily time spent watching Instagram reels than the run time for most feature-length films? You must be joking. The time I was spending on my phone each week roughly added up to the number of hours I might devote to a part-time job. It didn’t feel like I was on my phone for that long.
But I’ll tell you what it did feel like.
It felt like me being grumpy and getting snappy with my kids for no discernible reason.
It felt like a million things that needed to get done on my to-do list, and being able to cross off maybe only two of them by the end of the day.
It felt like me lamenting that I want to read more books but I can never find any time.
It felt like me getting angry or hurt or stressed out by internet strangers in the comment section of a post that I didn’t even write while I lounge in what should be the comfort of my own home at the end of the day.
When I stopped to consider the hours upon hours that I devoted each week to this toxic hobby, it made me shudder. I’m too embarrassed to even share what my numbers looked like during that dead week between Christmas and New Year’s. I knew that I needed some sort of reset or cleanse to start off 2026 on the right foot.
To be clear, this cleanse does not involve me going to extremes and locking my phone in a box somewhere or having certain “quiet hours” where I am completely unplugged. Being unreachable always scares me a bit (what if there is a family emergency?), and I am probably just not disciplined enough to practice “going dark” on a regular basis. But according to the stats on my Screen Time app, Facebook and Instagram were the two apps sucking most of my life away, so those were the two that I decided to temporarily delete from my home screen. I suppose I could have deleted them from my phone altogether, but I felt certain I would have the willpower not to go digging through the folders of my app library to find them.
But I didn’t realize until day one (and honestly, day two and three) how automatic my instincts were to open them. I wasn’t fully aware that when my alarm goes off on my phone in the morning, my tendency is to hit the snooze button and then to navigate over to Facebook and check my notifications. I automatically navigated to that empty spot on my home screen a stupid number of times before the instinct began to wear off. I almost felt a little lost. What should I look at first thing in the morning? I’ve started opening my weather app now and checking the weather. But as that really only takes a few seconds, I’ve started getting out of bed earlier (rather than continuing to scroll and hitting my snooze button several more times) and getting to work a bit earlier than I usually do. Huh…it looks like one good habit led to another.
According to my Screen Time app, I’ve also cut my screen time down by more than half. It turns out there’s just not as much to do on my phone without the temptation of endless scrolling. I can check my email and respond to text messages. I can jump on the internet and start researching tropical vacation destinations or current real estate prices. But there’s no algorithm black hole that is sucking me in and keeping me on my phone anymore. According to my Screen Time app, I’m still picking up my phone roughly 50-70 times a day, which isn’t much different from what I was doing before. But I’m staying on my phone for a much shorter amount of time and then setting it back down. I’ve also been replacing screen time with time spent reading actual books – a win/win.
So now I’m wondering, what will “graduation” from my social media cleanse look like? Will I carry any lasting lessons from this experience into my regular routine? Or will I quit my diet and go right back to over-consumption like a little kid let loose at a dessert buffet?
After digging into the analytics on my Screen Time app, I’ve realized that they have controls set in place that I’ve never made use of before. As parents, we talk all the time about setting limits on our kids’ screen time or physically removing their devices from them if we need to. But I had never thought about setting limits on my own screen time. My Screen Time app will do that for me! I might slowly end my cleanse by allowing myself only 20 minutes of Facebook time a day, just to see what that’s like. There are all sorts of options that I can customize. Maybe I stop allowing push notifications from socials? Maybe I leave the apps off of my home screen permanently to stop “accidentally,” instinctively scrolling? Maybe I’ll do another cleanse during the summer and then again in the fall, just to help myself remember that I really don’t need to consume social media on a daily basis.
