Log Off To Lock In

Do social media detoxes work?

Last June, I decided to ditch social media. ‘Are you sure?’ asked my phone each time. Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok disappeared from my homescreen.

These days, unplugging from the internet is like being exiled to the middle of the Pacific. Why on earth would anyone want to maroon themselves? Well, I’m a proud castaway. By watching people on my screen living their lives, had I been forgetting to live my own?

To get answers, I spoke to both the unplugged and proudly-plugged-in, as well as a behavioural scientist from the University of Glasgow.

After speaking to Cole Rees, a former study-abroad student from Boston, my efforts to disconnect were quickly put to shame.

“I had an iPhone, but when I had it, I would continuously deactivate my Instagram, then reactivate it. Then, eventually, I just deactivated it and never reactivated it again. I still had Snapchat, though, and then when I got home from being abroad in St Andrews, I traded my iPhone in for a flip phone,” he recalled, holding up his new Y2K artefact to the camera.

“It all just felt so fake to me,” Rees explained. “Your Instagram just feels like a separate identity that you have to keep up.” The introduction of Instagram reels “pushed [him] over the edge.” He’d already deleted TikTok but now found Instagram was becoming another short-video clone. “It’s just like an addiction,” he said. 

Rees is a “very anxious person” — he reckons that played a role in shaping his attitudes to social media: “When I’m seeing what other people are doing all the time I get a lot of FOMO.”

Rees has had a smartphone from the age of ten — losing it has taught him a lot. “The biggest thing I’ve noticed is how ingrained all this is in our lives. For instance, now I often can’t even access the menu in a restaurant because it requires you to scan a QR code,” he laughed.

Rees also recognised the more serious challenges of spurning the smartphones. He’s going to move to Madrid; he’ll have to get a phone then. “It will just make my life impossible if I don’t have one.”

Like many social media sceptics, Rees believes that by living chronically online, “we have become so detached from the understanding of what actual life is.”

His only regret? Not being able to get rid of his laptop, too. “It feels somewhat like a backdoor. In an ideal world, I think I’d just have a landline.” 

Whilst Rees may be content with just a landline, Bonnie White, a third-year Management and Sustainable Development student is certainly not. To her, social media is a “positive outlet. It’s always been a creative base.” 

Unlike Rees, she doesn’t see her online presence as a “fake reality”. “Yes, my life might be like that a lot of the time, but these are the things I like to do, and so I’m going to post that part of my life online,” she said. 

White was of a similar age to Rees when she first downloaded Instagram. When it came to TikTok, though, she wasn’t so keen. “I resisted TikTok until after lockdown. People would always complain about how much time they wasted on it, and I didn’t want to be like that. However, that being said, I had my reservations about BeReal, refusing to download it until maybe seven months into the trend, but I love BeReal now.”

White’s initial reservations about TikTok haven’t stopped her using the platform. “My first video was a singing video, which did quite well,” she recalled. 

Like Rees, it seems White also believes that “personality” plays an important role in one’s overall experience of social media. “It really depends what kind of person you are,” she said. 

“I’ve never felt addicted,” she said. “If I feel as though I’m spending too much time on [social media], I’ll just put my phone down. I’ve never felt the need to delete any of my platforms.”

White credits her former school for fostering this. “We had our phones taken away every day, but nobody cared because we were all in the same boat. Nobody was glued to their phones — it was a good environment.”

Active social media use has also landed White some pretty cool brand partnerships. “When I was doing all the ‘Bonnie’s Blog’ stuff during lockdown, I had a partnership with Shake Shack. They’d send me food for me and my family, which was lovely.”

Beyond burgers, her Instagram blog also attracted the attention of non-alcoholic gin companies, as well as opportunities to create content for other users. “I’ve had offers to create videos for other people and do other peoples’ social medias,” she recounted. 

However, it hasn’t been all sunshine and pixelated rainbows for White. When one of her TikTok videos went viral, she saw the sinister side of social media. “I started getting very weird messages from people I didn’t know, and it just made me feel so uncomfortable,” White recalled. “My biggest battle is that there comes a point where I get scared of how public [social media] can become.” 

Despite this, social media gets a thumbs up from White, although she remains conscious that, unfortunately, it doesn’t come without “some huge privacy problems”.

It was now clear to me that ditching social media worked for some but not for others, but where did this leave me?

Turning to the experts, I spoke with Dr Jo Inchley, a behavioural scientist and public health researcher at the University of Glasgow. In 2020, Inchley, alongside colleagues, conducted a study into online teens. The study didn’t condemn all social media usage, but rather distinguished between ‘intense’ usage and ‘problematic’ usage. 

“An intense user is someone who is pretty much online all the time, communicating with others throughout the day,” she explained, “whilst a problematic user is completely reliant on social media and struggles to regulate their usage.”

What they found was surprising: “The negative effects aren’t really as expected. In a country like the UK, where there’s high social media use, what we see is that intense users are more likely to report higher social wellbeing.”

“What emerged is that we have to accept digital technology as part of our lives. It’s less about social media use as an exclusively bad thing, and more about helping young people to recognise when it’s problematic,” Inchley explained. 

She also confirmed the link with personality: “What we see in terms of mental health outcomes is the interaction between the individual, their behaviour, and their social environment.”

Looking forward, she believes that “there’s no point blocking [social media] off as though it doesn’t exist.” Instead, “we must educate children in digital literacy so that they have the tools to navigate digital spaces better.”

Almost ten months into this offline experiment, I can certainly say that I feel different. In some ways, it feels as though a weight has been lifted off my shoulders, but, in others, I can’t help feeling that perhaps I’m missing something.

Is unplugging worth the trouble? Rees felt so: “I just want to live in the moment.”

Although perhaps using social media and ‘living in the moment’ aren’t mutually exclusive. The experts say “it’s not all bad,” and whilst going “cold turkey” might work for some, as Inchley pointed out, “there’s no evidence to say that that’s a positive strategy for everyone.” Indeed, “we all just need to find our own way through.”

Illustration by Isabelle Holloway