I Quit Social Media For A Week

“I quit social media for a week” is a pretty bold statement to make by today’s standards; wouldn’t you agree? I’m not going to lie, but I have an obsession with social media – there I said it. I’ve almost always got my phone on hand, checking apps to be nosy or scrolling through Instagram, secretly wishing my feed game was as strong.

Recently, I’ve noticed that my obsession with social media was becoming too much and I wanted to take a step back to see if I can change this habit, or at the very least, be able to control how many times a day I check various platforms.  

As someone who’s studying Journalism and as someone who has been told countless times of the importance of social media, I immediately had doubts about this little experiment. Would I really be able to give it up for a week? Where will I get my news from and how will I keep up to date with them? So as a sort of compromise, I told myself that I will only be allowed to check apps if I really, really had to (strictly work and university related), and with this in mind, I decided to go ahead.

On the first day of my social media hiatus, I woke up, instinctively grabbed my phone to turn off my alarm and went straight onto Facebook (oops). After the app had loaded itself and I saw how many notifications I had, it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks that I was supposed to be on a social media detox! So I very quickly closed the app.

As the day went on, I started to realise more and more just how much time I spend mindlessly scrolling through my newsfeed. I struggled to entertain myself when I got bored, because usually, when I do get bored, I just open Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat and then close it again when I find nothing else of interest on it. 

The next day was a little bit easier, as I was at uni for most of it, but during the third day I did notice that every time I went to reach for my phone I would ball my hand up into a fist to stop myself from checking social media. Eventually during the day, I’ll admit that I slipped and had a cheeky peek on Facebook and Snapchat just to see if I’d missed anything major, but to my surprise, I hadn’t missed anything at all!

As the week went on, I found that I was less anxious to find out what everyone else has getting been up to. I started filling the time I’d normally use to check social media by doing the required reading for uni, as well as reading fiction novels, and properly organising my schedule for the rest of the month. Don’t get me wrong, I was curious about the notifications I was getting, but I didn’t have that overwhelming urge to check the second I received them, which honestly, felt great!

Quitting social media for a week took some getting used to, but by the end of it, it felt amazing not to have that nagging feeling at the back of my mind that I may or may not be missing out on something by not keeping tabs on everyone else. I’d definitely recommend this little experiment if you’re overwhelmed by all your social feeds and feel that you could use a break from it all – even if it’s just for one week!

Do you think you could quit social media for a week? Let me know in the comments below!