A Week Without Instagram

A Sunday night. I'm face-down on the bed, a bit of alcohol in me, feeling downright miserable. It wasn't a particular event or a person. I hadn't had an angry phone call from my boss, or failed a uni assessment, or even spilt a $7 coffee on myself. I was just... a blob. I just felt like I wasn't achieving anything. It was uni break and I had friends laughing over misty apricot skies in Singapore and the Himalayas and Dubai. The popular girl from my high school had just started a lash tech business and received a PR deal for a popular festival brand. A vague list of other model girls in my area were now getting real full-time jobs and going away with their partners.
I had spent the last 4 days at home watching Netflix. My self-esteem was just soaring, thanks guys.

But who's to blame here? It's not anyones fault for living a good life, is it? After all, I know that when I have a new achievement or cool outfit or travel somewhere new, I'll definitely be having my community of friends and followers knowing about it. Why is it so different when someone else is doing good for themselves? With our society becoming increasingly accustomed to social media, its becoming harder for us to realise we're looking through someone else's rose-coloured glasses. I decided I wanted to live life without filters for a bit, and deleted Instagram.


When deciding to take time apart from my good friend Instagram, I didn't leave a "I'm on a mental health break, call me if you need me", I went cold-turkey. Within the first hour of deleting the app, I found myself aimlessly scrolling back and forth through the home screen of my phone trying to find ... oh, that's right... Instagram. It wasn't even a purposeful need to utilise the app. It was unconscious. I've often found that I like to use Instagram when I'm thinking, perhaps to avoid just sitting there, like scrolling a photo platform really makes thinking more concise and worthwhile.

The official first day of the cleanse, Monday, already showed some sort of improvement. I had left the house; I'd bought some christmas gifts and grabbed lunch with my cousin. Two birds one stone. Once I got home I started sewing again. Sewing! Something I had been putting off for months. I wrote an article. I was regaining some sense of self. Originally deleting Instagram was just a spur of the moment action so I wasn't feeling worse about myself, but it was doing more than that, so I kept going. I decided I'd give myself a full week without the app. All the way to Sunday night at 9pm, I would be semi-offline. I still had my other two favourites Facebook and Snapchat, but I knew Instagram was my biggest weakness.

By Wednesday I personally found the magic of no Instagram wearing off. Like the Internet junkie I was, withdrawals were now taking place. I felt that I was starting to spend more time on Facebook and Snapchat and even Depop to make up for the void in my mind and home screen. I was feeling a little bit bored with being disconnected, even though it was doing so much for me. This appeared like a step in the wrong direction; was I really that dependant on an app? This helped me realise the positive perspective of Instagram in a sense that it was a useful resource for inspiration. I often got style cues, cute little quotes and holiday ideas from the platform. The shift off of the platform just left me a little bit drained of stimulus, but all things must be taken in moderation. Perhaps the key to this was balancing. Like Pavlov, perhaps I needed to work at this from the angle of training myself to have some self-control and use the app in mild doses, not overdosing.

The weekend came along and I had moved past the cravings to normalise my life without Instagram. No, I had not turned into some productive monster eating up ideas and chugging out work and I wasn't "cured" of anything, but I did feel different in a way. I felt purposeful, and truthful to myself and what I wanted to do. I didn't have to kid myself, and it didn't matter what other people were doing differently. By Sunday night I didn't even feel the need to have it back. In fact, I even waited until midday Monday to re-download the app, and well, life didn't feel any different. My energy was still there.


Screen Time Summary

My screen time before the experiment is slightly embarrassing now that I look back on it. To be completely fair, I have been on holidays which has given me too much time to endulge. I was averaging 6hrs of screentime a day. I ended the experiment averaging 4.5 hours. It's been almost a month since my experiment now, and I've still managed to keep my time down from its original average. 


Outsider Opinion
Like I said, I removed the app from my phone without telling anyone - and I decided that this circumstance would extend to even my closest friends who I talk to almost everyday. Although I wasn't always evidently online on the platform, most of them I tagged in memes pretty frequently and vice versa. I told my 3 closest friends, and this was the response.
Friend 1: Found it weird I hadn't replied to their memes, but just thought I was busy.
Friend 2: Did not notice at all.
Friend 3: I found out this friend finished a mental health break from Instagram halfway through my experiment. She agreed with me that deleting the app definitely made a difference to mood and self esteem. Didn't notice I was offline.


It's kind of funny, isn't it? We're inhibiting our own growth and productivity to awe at other people's perceived productivity over the internet. Although at the same time it can be a queue for inspiration and our creative movements. From the subject of comparing the lives on Instagram, I've come to the conclusion that the less we know about a person, the more likely we are to take the fabricated story of their life on Instagram and other social media platforms more literally. All of us have our glorious fairy-tale experiences, but we also all have those shitty days where we don't leave the bed and live off of 2-minute noodles. Everything is in moderation, even social media.