Why You Should Delete Your Social Media This Summer
All iPhone users will know this experience. Your heart leaps with the dopamine hit of seeing a notification ping in, until you realise with a sinking feeling that it is informing you of your weekly screen time average. “Your screen time was up 188% last week, for an average of 3 hours, 13 minutes a day.”
This moment was recently a wakeup call for me. For the last year or so my screen time averages have been pretty consistent, but I’ve never really processed the notification before. That was until about a month ago when it showed up on my screen and I finally read and understood the words: for the last week, every day, I have spent 3 hours looking at this tiny screen. As I clicked through to check the wider report I was not at all surprised to see that the majority of that time was spent on social media. It’s the “night time can’t sleep” scroll, the “trying to wake up” scroll, the “I finished a task” scroll, the “I don’t want to start a task” scroll, the “I’m waiting for a friend” scroll, the “I can’t spend one minute in the bathroom without a screen” scroll, the “I don’t know what to do” scroll. So much of my precious, ephemeral life being spent on these scrolls.
The screen-time boom is something that we are all aware of, even if it isn’t a conscious factor for us. A noxious cocktail of the isolation of the lockdowns over the last three years and increasingly, while mind-numbing, engaging forms of social media is contributing to an ever expanding group who are inebriated by the screens of their phones. For some, this inebriation can be defined as an addiction and should be treated as such. But for those of us, like me, on the lower end of the use spectrum, that doesn’t mean we’re off the hook. It’s a habit that still has a significant impact on brain function.
In his 2022 book Rewired: Protecting Your Brain in the Digital Age, Carl Marci analyses the ways that our brains are changed by the habitual use of social media. From suffering withdrawal when separated from our smartphones to the drastic lowering of attention spans due to media multitasking and short social media clips, Marci illustrates how “when we change our behaviours, we change our brains.” Human behaviour has changed dramatically in the last 10 years due to the growing ubiquity of smart phones, and this change in behaviour has consequences for our brain function. The quick and easy dopamine hits of the social media cycle, which are often only connected to notifications but also include the impact of quick video content like Instagram Reels and TikTok, trains our brains in ways that tie us to these apps and encourage sources of immediate satisfaction. Through habitual use of social media our brains learn to not be satisfied with the slow norm of everyday life.
A familiar sight…
Marci’s claim that changing our behaviours changes our brains is not only a frightening indictment of the impact of social media use, but is also a hope for future salvation. If changing our behaviours could damage our brains, then changing behaviours can also be the solution. For me, once I identified a concerning compulsion that I had developed, as highlighted by my screen-time report, I immediately started to consider my options. The first step is noticing the problem.
What I knew I didn’t want was to give in to the sense that I needed to replace screen-time with personal productivity. This is a push against a norm where conversations about screen-time and social media use go hand-in-hand with laments about a loss of productivity. Things are said to the tune of: “if only young people spent less time on their phones they would get more done.” While there is likely truth in this, people have always found ways to procrastinate. A lack of productivity is not a uniquely contemporary problem, although the obsessive need to be productive might be. Rather than a wider focus on the productivity of systems, productivity has become an individual problem—a phenomenon considered by Cal Newport of The New Yorker. I agree with Newport, and do not want to suggest that a goal for social productivity is inherently evil, but rather wish to highlight the failure of individualistic productivity projects. In terms of the issue of screen-time, I wonder if our focus on personal productivity is driving people into the arms of social media and screen-time, instead of away from it. The interminable scroll is a wonderful method to escape from the reality and pressures that expectations of personal productivity place on us.
Rather than a desire to be more productive, my deletion of social media was about focussing on presence and rest, true rest, in my life. Sabbath or Shabbat has become something of a buzzword in Christian circles in recent years in connection to the practice of rest. Kelsey Osgood of Wired critiques the commodification of this ancient Jewish practice and outlines why the religious element of Shabbat is a necessary part of the process. She highlights the value of the communal nature of Shabbat as well as the inflexibility of the required obedience to God’s law concerning Shabbat; obedience which leads to surrender. In this way, the goal of Sabbath is different to that of a day off–it’s about a shifting of focus away from the self towards the collective and the divine. As a religious practice, this shifting of focus is certainly a mechanism for true rest.
When brought into the conversation about screen-time, Osgood’s insights encourage a reframing of the use of the language of Shabbat when connected to technology hiatus. Limiting your engagement with technology while surrounded by people who have not done the same, raises significant challenges for your own habit forming and shifting of focus. The communal and others focussed nature of Shabbat is what contributes to its impact. I’m not saying that everyone in your life needs to follow the same technology fast as you, but rather affirming that the benefit of these ancient practices is the intentionality and relationship, not the going without. In connection with my avoidance of productivity as a goal for reducing screen-time, practices of intentionality, rest, and slowing down, like those exemplified in true observations of Shabbat, allow me time to simply be instead of pursuing escapism through productivity or being sucked into a screen.
However, even thorough observations of weekly Sabbath are unlikely to break habits and change behaviours in the way that is needed for brain change. It is for this reason that I offer you a challenge. Delete social media for the summer. For many of us, summer is the time when social media shines. Whether it’s lazy days or big adventures, we find ourselves reaching for the screen to share our own exploits or to drool over someone else’s. This is the ideal time to remove the mechanism to break the cycle. This won’t be easy. Since deleting instagram I’ve certainly had a lot of what I call void time; the sort of time that used to be spent falling into the scrolling void. Use this time to teach your brain slowness: retrain your attention span, be present with those around you, feel the earth and sand and water.
Finally, one of Marci’s ten encouragements, all of which I highly recommend, is to give in to the JOMO (joy of missing out) instead of the FOMO (fear of missing out). Summer can be a time of loneliness or negativity about your own life; feelings that are only exasperated by social media. To embrace the JOMO is to find the peace and presence of not knowing how others are spending their time, and not caring whether they know how you’re spending yours. Deleting social media not only gives an opportunity to retrain your brain but also encourages practices of presence and peace.
Let’s all enjoy missing out together.
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Jaimee van Gemerden is editor at Metanoia.
