Take a Break From Social Media

Quick Win

Taking a vacation from social media — and the habitual checking of websites — may help you embrace calm and focus on other things.

Try This Today

• Turn off notifications. 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.
• Configure your phone or apps. On your phone, move the apps into a folder away from your home screen to make them harder to find. Or use an app that can turn your smartphone into a dumb phone by shutting down certain social media apps after you’ve spent a set amount of time on them. You can also deactivate entire accounts and reactivate them when you’re ready.​
• Tell friends and family to call. Let them know you’re taking a social media hiatus and will only be available by 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 makes it harder to decompress and embrace quiet reflection. A digital detox can help, research shows. People who used an app that turned their smartphones into dumb phones for two weeks — they could call and text but had no access to the internet, including social media — boosted their life satisfaction in a study of 467 adults, average age 32, published in PNAS Nexus in 2025. They also had less depression, anxiety and anger. According to the researchers, the depression symptom improvements were greater than what you’d get from taking an antidepressant. On one test of their ability to focus, participants improved by an amount equivalent to about 10 years of age-related decline.