Deactivate Your Social Media for a Week

Quick Win

Take a vacation from social media to stop habitually checking websites, which could lead to an addiction.

Try This Today

• Answer 6 questions:

1. Do you spend a lot of time thinking about ​​social media or planning to use social media?
2. Do you feel the urge to use social media more and more over time?
3. Do you use social media to forget about personal problems? 
4. Do you often try to reduce your use of social media without success? 
5. Do you become restless or troubled if you are unable to use social media?
6. Do you use social media so much that it has had a negative impact on your job or studies?

Saying yes to all six in this list, created by British psychologists Mark Griffiths and Daria Kuss, may signal you’re developing an addiction.​ A few yeses mean it may be time for a detox, they say. 

• Take a social media vacation. Pretend you’re going out of town to a place ​with​ no internet access. Turn off push notifications that are designed to get us to check social media accounts, such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X. On your phone, move the apps into a folder away from your home screen to make them harder to find. Or you can find apps that turn your smartphone into a dumb phone, shutting down certain social media apps after you’ve reached a ​set​ number of hours on them. You can also fully deactivate the accounts, turning them on again when ready.
• Tell friends and family to call. Let them know you’re taking a social media hiatus and will only be available via phone call. Better yet, how about some in-person chat time?

Why

Can you go one whole day without looking at your social media accounts? How about one afternoon? An hour? Any time at all? Social media activity can become so habitual, it starts to negatively affect other areas of life and robs our brain of the ability to decompress and embrace quiet reflection. Taking a break, says Elias Aboujaoude, M.D., director of the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at Stanford University School of Medicine, can help you figure out how to incorporate social media sites into your life “in a way that doesn’t feel like they have taken over.” 

While you can attempt to cut down on your tech time a little each day, going cold turkey for a weeklong detox can be even more beneficial, says Alex Lickerman, M.D., coauthor of The Ten Worlds: The New Psychology of Happiness. That’s because, according to Lickerman, “the longer you spend away from it, the less anxiety you’ll feel due to its absence.”