I went offline in June. I had just written this post about mom influencers and the dark underbelly of the comments section and was dialing back on my social media usage as a result. But my real breaking point came after I spent what felt like a full 48 hours virtually attending a relative stranger's wedding via Instagram Stories. Somewhere between watching their picture-perfect ceremony and feeling some sort of way about my own wedding (which I actually loved but was now comparing to this friend of a friend of a friend’s glossy highlight reel), I realized I needed to make a change.
I would like to be the type of person who pursues self-improvement out of a genuine desire to be better, but I am usually only willing to rethink my behaviors when I hit my own version of rock bottom. (See: my drinking career). We should all be spending less time on our phones. We know this. But I only logged off after I devoted yet another therapy session to anxiously comparing myself to the versions of people I saw online: their homes, bodies, relationships, and careers. Intellectually, I knew that what I was seeing online was curated, fake, not the full story. But it didn’t matter. I kept tricking myself into thinking that everyone else was happy every second of every day, because that’s what I saw online. I had to pay my therapist a silly amount of money to receive very simple and obvious advice: maybe you should take a break from social media.
Before I got sober, I used to have the fleeting thought that I would need to figure out the whole blackout drinking thing by the time I had kids. I imagined it would be really hard to parent with a raging hangover and giant memory lapses. But I always brushed the thought aside, rationalizing that I would magically figure out how to drink “normally” by then. Somehow, I would be fixed when I was a grown-up.
But I was stagnant, stuck in the same behavioral loop. And when I look back now, I realize that every small, intentional step I took after the first moment I quit drinking led me to the life I have today. A friend of mine always reminds me that “nothing changes if nothing changes.” I had to actively choose to stop binge drinking and withstand the discomfort of early sobriety that followed to build the life and version of myself I wanted. Similarly, I had to intentionally cut out social media to reset what was rapidly becoming my default setting: overstimulated, anxious, perpetually on my phone.
Like opting out of drinking when everyone else is doing it, going offline feels hard. Performing online can be addicting. I worried about missing out, losing touch, not knowing what was happening in the world. But I could not bring myself to spend another therapy session circling the same anxious mental loop. And so I signed off.
The rules of my experiment were as follows: I could still check email and browse the web (for online shopping, mostly – I’m only human), but I logged out of TikTok and Instagram and disabled push notifications for most apps (i.e breaking news updates that spiked my cortisol and distracted me when I was with my son). Once a week, I'd log onto Instagram from my desktop to check DMs (getting messages from readers is my favorite thing and I try to write back to them all), but there could be no mindless scrolling or watching stories that usually left me feeling worse than when I opened the app.
A few fairly obvious but still nice takeaways from spending two months offline: