Plan for tackling the habit

How I tackled an important problem and influenced myself and other people

At the beginning of December last year, I deleted all social media apps from my phone. In my case that meant Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Tiktok, and LinkedIn. Why did I do it?

I did not have the problem with over-consuming social media on my laptop as I don’t use it that much. I just don’t bother reaching for it in the evening, as my day involves sitting at a (work) computer the whole day anyway. So the problem was the mindless scrolling on my cellphone.

I knew something had to change and it had to happen fast. I had already tried all sorts of screen time reminders on my phone and I always ended up slamming the “Ignore for now” button. So I knew I had to do it cold turkey for it to work.

Before deleting the apps, I sent messages to all my friends and family saying that I won’t be very quickly reachable through social media from now on and they can just use my regular phone number to send me a text or call me if they need anything.

The funny thing was, most of them asked me: “Is everything okay?”. I thought to myself: yes, it will be, soon!

After I deleted the apps from my phone, the longest streak without logging in to any social media account was one week. And what happened when I logged back in one evening on my laptop? Nothing! I had missed out on absolutely nothing.

While I did have 15+ messages and 30+ notifications across different channels, none of them was urgent. Everyone that was close to me had been able to reach me through other channels.

After the first week without any social media, I made a deal with myself to spend a maximum of 1 hour a week on social media (on my laptop) just to reply to people and look for information in groups/pages if I needed to.

This means I still use social media but I’m not misusing it at the expense of my mental health and precious time.

When I set up the goal of quitting the mindless scrolling habit, the only expectation or hope I had was to be able to stick to what I had planned. But I’m happy to say that there are a number of other good things that came with it. Here are 5 most important take-aways for me:

I am not overloaded with information and the bits and pieces of the lives of people that I don’t even consider my friends.

By tackling the mindless scrolling habit, I became more self-confident in regards to tackling any other bad habit I need to get rid of. The good thing was I didn’t even experience any withdrawal symptoms. It might be because I have a family, a job, and a bunch of other daily tasks I needed to do.

Focusing on those things that are actually important to me, helped me ditch the need to reach out for my phone.

After deleting social media apps from my phone, I am reading books daily. I’ve read 4 books in 1,5 months which is more than I read during the whole past year.

I used to scroll a lot before going to sleep. That was the “me time” when my kid was asleep and no one could disturb me from engaging with my sweet habit.

Spending less time on social media, especially before sleeping, has made the quality of my 7,5-hour night sleep much better. That is pretty obvious because I am limiting my exposure to blue light before going to sleep. Blue light suppresses the production of melatonin in our bodies. Melatonin in turn is what helps us feel sleepy.

When I spoke out about my first successful week without mindless scrolling, several friends wanted to try the same. I was surprised to find out that many of them had suffered from the same bad habit and were not happy with the way it was disturbing their lives. By seeing my progress, they were also more motivated to try it out.

It is also much easier to be present and fully engaged in conversations with friends and family now that I don’t have the constant need to grab my cellphone every 2 minutes.

I do believe there are many pros to having an account on various social media platforms. The main things I appreciate are related to knowledge sharing and communication:

But I still believe I need to set clear boundaries on the time I spend on social media for the reasons I described at the beginning of the article. This is what works for me best. Balance is the key.

I spend around 1 hour a week on social media now. This is so much better than 2–4 hours a day. I am very happy with the change and am full of confidence that I can continue tackling other bad habits too (did you think that this was the only one? 🙈).

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