What Failed Social Media Detox Taught Me: Setting Social Media Boundaries Is Important

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On Sunday, I tried to go for a 7 day social media detox once again. If you’re a reader of my blog, you might remember my last year’s attempt, which was quite successful, to be frank. This time, though, I didn’t succeed.

I reinstalled Instagram just after the first 48 hours.

I’m not proud about it and I didn’t really want to admit my failure, so I stayed off stories for a couple more days. But let’s start from the beginning.

Last weekend, I watched The social dilemma documentary on Netflix. It was all about social media being manipulative and addictive, which I’ve already known for a long time. I really wanted to go for another social media detox to give myself a break and start a new year on a high note. Watching this documentary was the last push I needed to do that. So, without a further ado, I informed everyone on Instagram Stories that I’m disappearing for a week and uninstalled all social media apps from my phone.

First day was going good. Great even. I didn’t miss social media at all, although at some point I really regretted not having Instagram because I wanted to share some quote from a book I was reading and couldn’t do it. But it was really great in overall.

I can’t say the same about the second day.

My daughter went to the nursery for the first time and I became all fidgety. I needed something to distract me, and there was nothing. Reading a book didn’t cut it. So, when the evening rolled in, I reinstalled Instagram. I needed a distraction sooo badly at that point.

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Truth be told, I didn’t miss scrolling through Reels or even wasn’t very interested in keeping up with stories. All I wanted to do was to share some bits and bobs from my day.

Day before reinstalling the app, I journaled about it during my Evening Pages practice. It helped me decide what to do, whether I should stick to my social media detox or forget about it. And if I was going back earlier, then should I limit usage, or do anything else like that?

That’s how I came up with the idea of setting social media boundaries. I believe everyone should set them and here’s why.

4 reasons for setting social media boundaries

Social media decreases amount of truly social interactions

Even though social media has “social” in it, it decreases the amount of truly social interactions. Especially if you use it a lot. It’s easier to check Instagram to see what your friends and family are up to instead of meeting with them, after all.

It can be addictive

Social media are created to be addictive, that’s not a secret. They’re like a slot machine in a sense. If a gambler knew they won’t win any money, they wouldn’t play at all. But the outcome isn’t always clear. The possibility of winning makes them use those machines.

The same goes for social media apps. You never know how many likes you’ll get, who will like your photos or when. Have you noticed that Instagram doesn’t send you notifications every time you receive a like or a comment, but it notifies you randomly? That’s to make you expect the unexpected.

Just look at how often the algorithm keeps changing. You never know what will get you more likes, if you should engage with the app after posting a photo or leave immediately. What time you should post it, how many hashtags to include, etc. Let’s not forget about reels and stories. How often should you post? Let’s try different things and see what works best!

And at the end you spend hours on social media without even realising it.

Social media can cause depression, anxiety, and burnout

Using social media often limits more authentic social interactions and the time we’re being present in a real life. Instead, the FOMO comes in. You’re often absent-minded, thinking about the party you found out about via Instagram and nobody invited you to or you constantly refresh your feed waiting for your friends to post a new photo.

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“Living” in the online world makes you feel burned out and can cause depression and anxiety. Nothing is so rewarding as refreshing the feed and getting a new post. Reading books and meeting with others aren’t exciting anymore.

You need something stronger.

Something that will trigger dopamine release.

Something like watching a few funny Reels, for example.

It won’t make you feel any better, though. Usually scrolling through social media feels emotionally draining and you might feel even more tired and sad than before.

It negatively impacts your self esteem

Our minds are not created to withstand constant exposure to other people’s opinions and negative comments. And this is what you can expect when you post on social media.

It’s not a secret that social media are full of photoshopped images, crafted to manipulate you into thinking that their author leads a perfect life. Even if you know that’s not true, it’s easy to forget about that and get into the trap of constant comparison. Everyone wants to look the best, feel successful, live a great life and those desires sometimes blind them into believing that those faked photos represent real life.

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10 ideas for setting social media boundaries

Setting social media boundaries is all about being intentional while spending time with them. They’re here to support you and work for you. Boundaries help you protect your time and peace, making sure that you won’t fall into a social media trap of scrolling your feed for hours and checking notifications every couple of minutes.

Clean your social media feed

Take control over your feed and unfollow accounts that bring nothing good into your life. How do you feel about going through some photos? Do they make you feel bad, uncomfortable, jealous? There’s no point in following someone if they evoke any negative emotions. Protect your peace and mental wellbeing at all costs.

Social media free weekends

This is something I’ll start doing from now on. I tried doing offline Sundays in the past, but it didn’t go well. Now I feel confident that weekends off social media are something I can easily do, although I’m not sure yet whether I’ll do traditional Saturday & Sunday type of weekend, or maybe experiment a bit and go for Sunday & Monday instead.

Social media free weekends are an idea worth looking into, especially if you tend to sacrifice family time in order to stay in bed for longer and play on your phone. Just look at how much more time you’ll have once you ditch social media for two days! Who knows, maybe you’ll find a new hobby or start a side hustle during that time?

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Offline evenings

It’s a similar idea to social media free weekends and no screen time after waking up. Limit your phone usage in the evening, let’s say two hours before going to bed. Don’t check Instagram, don’t watch TikToks, don’t send any snaps to anyone (is there anyone who still uses Snapchat btw?). Allow your mind to calm down and unwind before bedtime.

Create first, consume second

This is a real game changer, especially if you’re doing anything that requires you to be creative. It can be anything like creating content, drawing, or just writing an essay. I used to start my day by scrolling Instagram and other social media, but one day I noticed it kills my creativity completely. So, I made a pact with myself. I can’t open social media apps before writing at least 400 words. And you know what? It changed everything for me! Now I feel more energized and creative that ever before. Writing isn’t a burden like it was previously.

If you do nothing creative, maybe look for a new hobby. Or journal. There are a lot of different activities for you to explore.

No screen time during the first hour after waking up

This one goes closely with creating before you consume, but it applies to literally everyone. When you wake up, don’t pick up your phone immediately. Don’t open any social media apps in the first hour after you wake up. Read a book, journal, drink coffee outside while admiring beautiful sunrise.

If you can’t resist temptation on your own, there are a lot of apps that can help you with that, like Opal for iOS and AppBlock for Android.

Set app limits and downtime

If you don’t want to install any additional apps, most of the phones allow you to set app limits and downtime in their settings. There’s one catch though – you can easily bypass this setting and turn it off anytime you want to.

If you want to try it out, go to your Settings -> Screen Time -> Downtime / App Limits.

If you have a phone with Android, go to your Settings -> Digital Wellbeing -> App timers.

There’s no such thing as Downtime on Android, unfortunately. You can just turn on the Bedtime mode which doesn’t block any apps but turn on do not disturb mode and change screen colour to grayscale, which makes using your phone less interesting than it normally is.

Check your privacy settings and customise them to your liking

Every app has different privacy settings that you can customise. Let’s look at the Instagram, for example. If you go to your Settings -> Privacy, you can see lots of different things you can set. At the top, you can decide if your profile should be private or not. It might be a good idea to turn it on if you want your account to be just to communicate with your family and friends.

There’s also an option to set hidden words. It will limit the amount of harmful or offensive comments and messages you might receive. You can also block comments or hide stories from certain people, and much more.

Probably one of the most important settings is activity status, which you can turn on or off. If you don’t want anyone to know when you’re online, just turn it off and enjoy this newfound peace. It can be especially helpful if you have a large following.

Check out privacy settings in every app and play with them. Make sure that they’re exactly like you want them to be.

Decide why you want to use social media

Have you ever thought reasons why you use your social media apps? I didn’t for a very long time. Recently I started questioning my reasons. Is it to escape a reality? Is it because you’re bored? Or maybe you want to use them to promote your business?

Think about your “why”. Set a purpose for your actions and follow it through. If you want to promote your business, use it only for content creation and engaging with your followers. Don’t follow random accounts to limit the possibility of scrolling through your feed instead of working. If it’s escaping reality, maybe you should dig deep into why you want to do it instead of turning to social media?

Don’t engage with negative comments

Ignore, block, or delete. The choice is yours. There’s no point in engaging with negative comments because they’re usually all about their author, not about you. You won’t win or prove anything by trying to fight them off.

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Turn off notifications

This is such an important, but often overlooked, thing to do! Turn off your notifications. All of them. Leave them on for Messages, Phone, and anything else that’s important to you, but don’t allow some random apps to spam you with meaningless notifications that are nothing more than unnecessary nuisance. Don’t let social media apps to manipulate you into checking every notification they send you. Just don’t.

When you pick up your phone to check the notification you just received, there’s a huge chance that you’ll end up scrolling through some random feed and won’t even notice when you spend there half an hour or more.

Turn off your notifications. Be in control of why and when you check your phone and open apps.

Failure or a lesson?

At first, I was truly disappointed with myself. It’s not the first time I attempted to go for a social media detox, so why I failed? I was so ashamed I didn’t want to admit my failure to anyone until now.

When I started thinking and journaled about the entire experience, I noticed I didn’t fail but learned a lesson. Lesson, which was much more valuable than achieving a week off social media.

Sure, social media detox is a powerful thing and can help immensely, but its positive effects won’t stay with you for long once you revert to your old habits. Hence why I believed that lesson I learned from this experience was much more valuable – I noticed my bad habits and set solid boundaries to protect my time and peace.

Setting boundaries and creating habits

I started implementing them slowly, one by one, to make sure that those habits will last for long. Currently, even though Instagram is still one of the most used apps in the past week, my daily average is down for 50% from last week. I don’t check social media every time I’m bored, but I go there to reply to messages or to check something in particular. I don’t binge watch reels or scroll through my feed – I don’t remember when was the last time I actually did that.

PIN IT FOR LATER!

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Final words about setting social media boundaries

Sometimes a small mindset shift is all you need to see something from a different perspective. You’re in control of your life and actions, so make sure that everything you do works for you and fits into your life’s vision.

I heard somewhere that you can’t repeat the same actions and expect different results. That’s so powerful.

Setting social media boundaries is difficult, especially if you’ve done nothing like that before. It’s possible, though, but might require a lot of willpower to break your current habits. Choose a few social media boundaries and implement them one by one. Go slowly and make sure they last for long.

Good luck!