A Year Without Instagram, Part 2

It didn't go how I thought it would. And then it (sort of) did.

This is Part 2 in a series about leaving Instagram and observing myself existing without it for a whole year. You can read Part 1 here and Part 3 here.

Obviously, if you’re enjoying your time on IG or TikTok or any of the platforms and don’t feel the need to explore a break, that’s fantastic for you! No judgment from me, and what follows will probably read like a whole lot of hand-wringing over something that isn’t A Thing for you. But I’ve had enough conversations to know that it very much IS A Thing for many of us, so let’s continue unpacking this…

I have read a lot of articles and listened to a lot of folks talk about strategies for breaking phone addiction, social media addiction, or Instagram-specific addictive behaviors. And while many of the tips make perfect sense, like signing out of the app or deleting it from your phone altogether, in the end the decision I made on the couch in a rented flat in London didn’t require a ton of accountability-safeguards to retrain my habits or ensure I stuck to my goal.

What was helpful, though, was to decide for myself the ways in which I would continue to interact with this app that is now so embedded in our culture, especially given that I co-own a media property with its own online presence and communities. I’m a rule-follower (and an enthusiastic rule-maker), so defining my (new) relationship with Instagram made sense for me. Here’s where I landed:

• My goal was not to scrub myself from the Internet or deactivate my account; my goal was to stop scrolling/consuming for mindless entertainment;

• I wanted ‘permission’ to use Instagram as a tool in the way we all use Google Maps or the flashlight on our phones: utilitarian when employed at the right time, but not an app I need to open when I’m bored or anxious; as such, I did not delete it from my phone. I moved it to an inconvenient location instead, and relied on other methods to stick to my plans (of note: I already had all notifications turned off, including those sexy badges).

• Because the app was still on my phone, it allowed me to occasionally follow a link to a video if someone sent it to me, open up a business’s profile to see their hours of operation, or check to see that The Mom Hour’s auto-scheduler was working. In other words, the Instagram app became a little more like a browser than a social network: I allowed myself to open it if there was something very specific I needed to look up, watch, or check out. But I treated the main feed, the Explore/for you page, and the reels section like a ‘floor is lava’ situation: I avoided and averted my eyes lest I get sucked in again.

• I did not want to miss out on DMs from actual people in my life, so I decided I’d open my DM Inbox on my laptop every few days to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, and that worked well. As the months passed I got way fewer DMs anyway, and I now go a week or more without checking those messages.

With these self-imposed guardrails in place, the first couple of months without Instagram passed, and I was pleasantly surprised that sticking to my own rules wasn’t all that hard. I felt emboldened as time went on in identifying as someone who ‘just didn’t use’ Instagram.

On the flip side, I had some less-pleasant surprises, too. I had envisioned a kind of freedom from scrolling behavior that would result in feeling more grounded, less anxious, more creative, less inattentive, etc. Instead I had to face a bunch of behavioral realities that it turns out could not be solely blamed on Instagram, such as:

Leaving Instagram did not get me to put down my phone.

I find this curious, and a little disheartening. I thought for sure that quitting Instagram, an app designed to keep me scrolling and keep me coming back, would mean I’d spend less time on my phone overall. Instead, the dopamine-seeking impulse just shifted to other apps.

For most of 2024, my ‘open-this-real-quick-and-see-what’s-happening’ destination was the New York Times app, which one could argue represented an admirable desire to read longform articles and stay informed about the news of the world, if one wanted to ignore the reality that what I was actually doing was opening the app, scanning headlines for something alarming/exciting/dangerous/surprising/novel, reading nothing, and popping out again. I was essentially scrolling NYT in the same way I used to scroll IG.

In times of anxiety or boredom I’d also look for deals on my favorite secondhand clothing app, skim headlines in my regional and local news apps, and even open Google Photos to see the little slideshows of curated memories the robots had prepared for me. None of this resulted in less time with smartphone in hand; it was simply a redirection of the urge to reflexively open an app.

I absolutely do miss out. I am 100% less in the loop.

As a general rule I don’t suffer from FOMO as much as some of my friends, probably because I tend toward introversion and I’m pretty good at not taking it personally if I don’t get an invite to every potential hang. So I didn’t expect feelings of being left out, or being out of the loop, to crop up as I distanced myself from the ‘gram.

As it turns out, my version of FOMO has more to do with staying abreast of what’s happening generally (being in the know) than it does with being invited to social gatherings specifically (being included in the group). It’s a kind of knowledge FOMO rather than a social one, and I absolutely have felt the sting of ignorance during my time off the app.

It reminds me of when I was in junior high and I knew none of the bands or musical references my peers were into. In those days I unconvincingly lip-synched along and hoped nobody noticed; as an adult I’m a little more comfortable saying, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

It’s hard to put my finger on what kind of knowledge I’m missing out on exactly, but it’s like an amalgamation of pop culture references and memes, life updates from distant friends and acquaintances, viral essays and the hot-button responses they inspire, and who-knows-what-all else. But there’s stuff being shared on Instagram that I’m not getting anywhere else and sometimes I’m publicly caught unawares.

I’m not reading, writing, or creating more.

This is a tough one to acknowledge. I was pretty convinced that the imbalance in my consumption/creation equation would shift when I got off the app. Aside from my work producing and hosting The Mom Hour, my creative output (professionally or for funsies) has really dried up over the last several years. What little was left usually happened on the ‘gram in the form of artful photography and micro-essays in the caption, or maybe in a funny story series or the occasional how-to reel.

I hoped that getting off Instagram would free up some time and headspace, break the cycle of overthinking about my audience that I wrote about in Part 1, and inspire new outlets for writing and creativity. I figured that at the very least I’d read more, what with the found pockets of time that were previously devoted to the scroll (alas: see NYT doom-scanning, above).

I will say that I wrestled with creativity, I thought about writing, and I imagined content ideas more this past year than in the previous few, and I wonder if the very first baby step was getting off Instagram to make space for said wrestling. I wonder if eliminating what had become a pretty predictable diet of squares, grids, carousels, and swipe-throughs, I began to pay more attention to other modes and forms of content. I signed up for newsletters from local businesses I care about; I started reading more here on Substack. I started doing morning pages this fall and actually stuck with a journaling practice for longer than, like, a day. As I approach the 12-month mark of my time off of Instagram, I’m just barely starting to see what we might call ‘results’ in the creativity department.

Was it worth it? Yes.

So to recap: I’m still pretty addicted to my phone and I have different apps that I compulsively open 6,000 times per day. I’m way more out of the loop with my online pals, I miss announcements from schools and organizations who use Instagram to inform their communities, and I’m just generally less in the know. I haven’t undergone a radical transformation in how I approach longform reading, creative practices, or any other soul-nourishing stuff. I’m still figuring out what it means for me socially, and with my IRL and online friendships, something I explore in Part 3.

But. And. There are some real and important changes I have noticed, even if they’re not the ones I hoped for or expected:

• I navigated the lead-up to, and the let-down of, the 2024 presidential election much differently than my friends who spend a lot of time on social media (I can say this from comparing notes with said friends - not out of any kind of projection or judgment).

• Related much more to the election than to my decision to get off of Instagram, I have completely re-wired my compulsion to check the news multiple times per day. I read my city’s weekly paper in print and online and I listen to a couple of current events podcasts, and that’s it for right now. This may change over time but right now my news media consumption is healthier than it’s been in 10 years and the positive impacts on my mental health are inarguable.

• I did, in fact, read more books in 2024 than the previous few years. Not a lot more, so at first it felt statistically insignificant, but I will finish out the year at 26 total books read, whereas the past few years it’s been in the 17-20 range. That’s actually a 30% increase in the number of books read, which is absolutely significant.

The cumulative effect of the above: worrying less about the news, paying more attention to what’s happening here at home in my community, and reading more books for pleasure DOES, in fact, seem to have led me here, to this newsletter, and to writing again.

And that’s definitely something.

I hope you’ll head over to read Part 3 in this series next!