How I trained myself to spend less time on social media

The numbers were in, and they were not good. I logged out and checked again in case the verdict was an anomaly, but the same words glowed back at me from the screen in a succinct serif font: three hours, 12 minutes. Longer than the runtime of Avengers: Endgame, a movie tasked with covering multiple timelines in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Surely, I could not have spent that much time on social media in a day? As the stereotypical dedicated student through my academic years, this was akin to bringing a bad report card home—my daily usage time had been circled in red and branded an ‘F’ grade in a world that commanded you to keep up with the latest world events making news online while also pursuing varied, mindful interests beyond the virtual realm.

If the problem was complicated, the most obvious solution—to spend less time on social media—wasn’t straightforward either. On the first day of going cold turkey, I began to notice a gnawing, itching feeling to reach for my phone, my fingertips often making a beeline for the Instagram icon on autopilot. Feeling the first stirrings of desperation now to prove that I wasn’t a slave to the screen, I opted for a particularly time-intensive recipe that would keep me away from my phone for a few hours, at least. But once it was done, the meticulously constructed dessert stared back at me glumly from the plate—all dressed up and nowhere to go. Without being able to snap a photo to share online with my virtual friends and connections, the emotional payoff for my labour simply didn’t feel validated.

I was adrift without my phone to anchor me to the virtualverse, and I wasn’t the only one—studies have found that 73 per cent of people experience a mild state of panic upon misplacing or being isolated from their phones. So, what is keeping us hooked to the buzzes and the beeps of social media and is there a way to train your brain into breaking free? Here’s what we found.

Death by design: Why it’s so easy to use social media to kill time

A closer investigation proves that it is no accident that we can immerse ourselves in our phones for hours at a time—modern-day social media portals have been designed to push the right levers in our cognitive circuitry to release feel-good chemicals. Indeed, researchers have discovered that the act of receiving likes and comments is linked to the concept of social reward which floods our brain with happiness-inducing dopamine.

The Pavlovian response triggered by the ping of an incoming notification has been underlined further against the context of a year that saw us spending our time indoors. The concerns around screen addiction have been steadily spiking, with several research endeavours reporting a dramatic increase of 39 per cent in the usage of smartphones in the year 2020 alone. The other findings of the study portray a grim picture as well—when asked to put the phone away, a significant majority of the respondents observed moodiness, irritability and a sense of isolation. Dialling back the statistics of our screen time, then, is no longer just a vanity metric, but a means to safeguard our mental health in these unprecedented times.

How to train your mind to stop using social media to kill time

It becomes important to note, at this point, that social media isn’t the enemy—during the second wave of the pandemic, it has proved to be a vital lifeline for disseminating crucial information. However, when mindless scrolling becomes a default filler for any lull in the day, it is time to find mindful ways to engage with technology and to become more intentional with the time being spent online:

The first step towards recovery is to opt for a thorough diagnosis—several phones have an in-built screen time checker to track your daily usage, while apps like Rescue My Time can help as well. Once you have observed the areas that need to be rectified and defined your goal time for everyday usage, apps like Facebook and Instagram offer a screen limit reminder that can be activated to keep you on track.

While it has become second nature for many to pour over social media like the morning newspaper, it helps to parcel your social media usage through the day. Instead of immediately checking your notifications upon waking up, it helps to start the day on a bright note by opting for meditation or gratitude journaling before picking up the phone.

If you find yourself reaching for your phone every time it pings, it might be time to reassess your notification settings. While starting out on a new platform, these tend to be restricted to the people you know but as you spend more time online, the berth is widened to include friends of friends or broader interests. It helps to whittle the list down to just the essential notifications you’d like to receive and to mute or unfollow accounts that aren’t beneficial to you any longer.

If social media has been eating your quality time with your loved ones, a good place to begin rectifying that would be to opt for device-free meals so you can reconnect with everyone and catch up on their day. Turn your daily dinners into a no-phone zone by placing it in another room altogether to avoid having the beeps interrupt your meal.

If you are worried about staying faithful to your goals, it can be helpful to employ an accountability buddy to keep you on track. It is known that we tend to perform better when we are being watched over by someone, and routine virtual check-ins from another person might prove helpful for supporting you along the journey.

Having access to the virtual world at the click of a button means that, over time, our fingers can become habituated to clicking on an app by default. To break the pattern, it can help to routinely reshuffle your app icons so that they aren’t always at hand’s reach.

The easiest way to reduce our dependence on our phones is to replace virtual conversations with IRL alternatives. Call your friends to check in with them instead of sending a message, pen a handwritten letter instead of sending a birthday text and call your mom for a recipe or a sari tutorial instead of watching one online.

Positive reinforcement can also serve as a handy tool in the battle to regain control of our screens. Set up your own reward system—no social media until everything has been struck off from your to-do list but an additional fifteen minutes for finishing your everyday chores beforehand as well.

It would be foolhardy to expect to achieve digital minimalism overnight, but some combination of the above measures appears to have waved its wand for me. At the time of writing this, the screen usage on my personal account had been brought down to nine minutes on an average over the course of six weeks. In a world that consistently rewards multitasking—staying active on every single social media platform, hopping on to the latest viral trends before others, being the first to share the newest memes on the Friends reunion—single-tasking might prove to be the most revolutionary act of all.

Also read:

Want to build a new healthy habit? Just follow these 7 expert-approved steps

Scroll less, scroll smarter: how to make your social media feed more enriching in 2021

Tired of doomscrolling? Vogue India staffers share their secrets to ‘joy scrolling’ on the internet