Instagram’s new feature will remind you to take a break from social media

Instagram has started rolling out a new feature called ‘Take a Break’ across countries, including India, that essentially reminds users to get off the platform for a bit, particularly the younger users.

Doomscrolling has become quite a terrible habit for most social media users, especially over the last two years that saw most people quarantining indoors due to the pandemic. Instagram’s Take a Break comes as an in-app reminder that you perhaps need to log out and do something else.

The ‘Take a Break’ feature essentially gives users an option to set up reminders to take a break after a certain amount of time. Instagram head Adam Mosseri had explained how this feature works in a tweet in November last year, where he said that ‘Take a Break’ has been designed to remind users to stop using the app after they have spent a certain amount of time on it.

The ‘Take a Break’ feature will show up for users who have been spending a certain amount of time on the app and they will be nudged to set up reminders to take more breaks going forward. The app is also furnishing “expert-backed tips” that aims to help the user to “reflect and reset”. Instagram’s younger users are the main target audience for this feature

Of course, the ‘Take a Break’ feature is an optional one and users can pick between 10-minute, 20-minute, or 30-minute intervals for reminders on the app to get off it. The feature was initially being tested in the US, UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada and is now rolling out more globally.

This ‘Take a Break’ feature is not the only feature that Instagram has that encourages people to log off and do something else. The Meta-owned platform also has a feature called Daily Limit that, as the name explains, lets users set a time limit on how much time they want to spend on the app daily.

Instagram has partnered with youth platform We The Young to spread awareness about the ‘Take a Break’ feature in India with a campaign called ‘Break Zaroori Hai’.

Meta was severely criticised last year when whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed that the company’s own research had found that Instagram “could have detrimental effects on young users’ mental health’. This ‘Take a Break’ feature started being tested soon after to get younger users to spend less time on the app.

The ‘Take a Break’ feature is currently available on iOS and will roll out on Android soon.

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