No, really, it's an addiction
I've seen headlines and references to "social media addiction" for years, but I always dismissed them as inflammatory. After all, I'd taken long breaks from Facebook at various times. I'd gone months at a time forgetting I even had a Twitter account. I used Instagram for maybe five minutes, and I am sufficiently Old that I never got the hang of Snapchat or Tiktok.
Then I cut off all my social media accounts.
When I left for good, the only ones remaining were Pinterest (where I never socialized with anyone, ever), Tumblr, and Reddit. I also deleted my Amazon account and removed the Libby and Hoopla apps from my phone. I'd discovered that when I was bored and in doomscrolling mode, I'd doomscroll anything with an endless feed - and when that feed was Amazon, I nearly always ended up buying things.
That was about two weeks ago, and wow was I wrong about the "addiction" thing.
I assumed that, even if humans in general could get addicted to social media, I wasn't. After all, I'd muted notifications years ago. I keep my phone screen in greyscale unless I really need to see things in color. I don't remember the last time I had an actual social media app on my phone; I've read them all in the browser since sometime in the 2010s. (In fact, I quit Facebook entirely when Facebook's mobile browser experience got so bad it rendered the site unusable.) Surely it wouldn't be that big a deal to just not have social media accounts anymore, right?
Wow. Wrong.
I keep catching myself automatically doing habitual "social media checking" behaviors, like picking up my phone, opening the lock screen, and staring at it for a second before remembering "the thing you are looking for is not here."
I've had several mood swings - sudden, inexplicable anger; depression-flavored La Croix; bursts of anxiety bordering on panic. Usually they're related to those times I reflexively pick up my phone. Or to times I would check my phone, except there's nothing there to see.
I nearly cried the first day after I deleted everything, when I had four whole minutes to spare before a church service started and I had (deliberately) left my phone in the car. That's right: I couldn't sit four minutes in a gorgeously decorated room with a view of a lake right outside the window without jonesing for The Scroll.
I've also been having insomnia. For the past week, my brain has felt the need to wake up at 5:30 a.m. Which would be fine - my usual wakeup time is 6:15 anyway - except that it won't go to sleep until after 11.
I joined a couple Internet forums when I quit social media, because I didn't want to quit online socializing entirely. But none of them have mobile sites, and their format makes them difficult to navigate on a phone. Which was the point when I joined them. I'm trying to train myself to go back to a 1990s "going on the computer" mode of behavior, where email/forum checking/website updating is something I do on a computer, not from my phone.
I've caught myself opening those forums several times, trying to recreate the social media endless scrolling experience.
It took me several days and a couple Internet searches to semi-confidently define it as withdrawal. I've never actually had withdrawal symptoms from anything before. But I have no other explanation.
The worst part (to me)? I don't want to be back on any of those sites. I don't want to scroll mindlessly forever in lieu of doing an actual thing, often to end up spending money I don't have.
My life has improved dramatically in the two weeks or so I've been off social media. I've noticed exactly how cheap the imitation of satisfaction is in the endless-scroll feeds. How pale and sickly it is compared to the actual satisfaction of, say, tweaking my own HTML, or baking cupcakes, or brushing the pets, or literally anything that isn't engineered to keep me scrolling.
These sites are designed to give our brains just enough satisfaction to keep us hooked - but never so much that we step away pleased with a job well done. My mood, my mental stamina, my creativity, my work, and my relationships are better off without them. I'm doing better in every identifiable way.
Except these pesky symptoms.
Years ago, I went through the chronic pain rehabilitation program at the Cleveland Clinic. When I entered, I was on very few meds, but many of my fellow attendees were working their way off various medications - usually opioid painkillers.
I remember the doctor reassuring one patient, whose withdrawal symptoms were particularly stubborn: "This is the only thing I treat that has a one hundred percent success rate. The symptoms will go away. It just takes time."
I repeat this to myself when I find myself staring at my phone screen like it told me my dog just died. It takes time.
After all, I was a rat in the cage, pressing the cheap dopamine bar, for over a decade. It's okay if my brain needs a few weeks to get over that particular form of torture.