Essentiality of Social Media: Reinstalling Instagram after 7 months

In a beautiful morning sometime around March 2024, I decided to delete Instagram from my phone. For the longest time, I struggled with doom scrolling on there for hours, and at some point it used to be the first thing I’d do in the morning when I’d wake up, which you can obviously tell wasn’t healthy at all for multiple reasons.

But doom scrolling wasn’t really the only issue and main factor motivating my completely wiping Instagram out of my life. I was also suffering from the negative consequences of spending a lot of time on there, such as: overstimulation and mental fog/exhaustion, the exaggerated comparison with other people (including people I don’t even give two sh*ts about) which just reinforced my insecurities and feeling of self-consciousness, and of course the good old loss of sense of self and authenticity, and the feeling of disconnection, both of which I’ve written about in some of my previous blogs. We’ve all been there.

And because I was at the same time very conscious about it all, I knew I needed some time away from the platform and I knew what I had to do, but I was back and forth between deleting it and keeping it. Until some random day, I decided to just delete the app altogether without thinking much about it. And it was the best thing I’ve done for myself this year.

I deleted Instagram. Now what?

The main thing on my mind were my reflections on all of the issues I mentioned above, mostly just me realizing how bad it all was and how I wanted to take action to make things better. Another thing I noticed in a more conscious level was the automatic habit chain of unlocking my phone, opening Insta and scrolling happening multiple times during the day. So what did I do? Of course I replaced Instagram with Pinterest so I had another app to scroll. This may not come across as the smartest thing to do in this case, since I wasn’t really solving the whole scrolling addiction issue, but reinforcing it instead, however I found that Pinterest was actually pretty healthy and helpful for me in that sense.

Intentionally using Pinterest

In the past, I think my Pinterest feed mostly had pins on very aesthetic focused things, I’d have moodboards on there, pins of my favorite celebrities, a few boards on travelling, but mostly, everything felt unattainable to me at that point, and so it was like an alternate reality. These days, however, my Pinterest feed actually has a bunch of things that I want to do in real life, things that I could very easily do if I took action to do them. This is mostly because I tried to nurture the intention of spending my time more mindfully, doing things that made more sense to me, and doing things in the real world; so I decided I would apply this on the time I’d spend virtually as well.

These are screenshots of my Pinterest feed. You can see there are some recipe tutorials, some nice art, crochet tutorials, journal prompts and game recommendations, and of course, the annoying ads (not the point of this post, but I could definitely write another post just ranting about and analyzing ads in social media in general)

So what ended up happening whenever I would open the app and scroll was: it made me want to actually try out those things I wanted to do in real life, so I’d close the app and do them. It was the best way to get some motivation without being trapped in it, if that makes sense.

I feel like myself again 🙂

So in the last 7 months, I’ve picked up on new hobbies like crocheting and playing electric guitar, and reconnected with old ones like painting, journaling, and cooking. In turn, this not only made me feel more connected to myself and to my reality, but also helped me to identify and start dealing with some of my insecurities, especially the ones I kept reinforcing when I was on Insta.

What made me reinstall the app?

Now that I spent a while working on those areas, I finally feel like myself again. But recently I also started to miss a few things about being on Instagram, like casually interacting with and meeting different people, seeing what my loved ones and people who inspire me are up to, being aware of what’s trending in the online communities I used to be part of, keeping up with updates and news, and so on.

All in all, I don’t think being on Instagram is a bad thing or a bad way to spend one’s time, just like everything has its perks and its downsides. But I do believe that actively being mindful of intentionality, and connected to what makes sense to you, can proportionate a better experience on there.