Can I Beat My Addiction?. This story will take you through my…
By: Ulka M.
Tags: Social Media, Instagram, Addiction, Mobile Apps, Zen

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

This story will take you through my journey when I was briefly addicted to Instagram and the events that led me to quit.

My name is Ulka and I am addicted to Instagram!

It all began with the birth of the internet. To tell you a bit about myself, I am a Gen Y also known as the millennial. Gone are the days when age was how you were known! I was a teenager when social media was born. Those were the glorious days of using a Yahoo messenger, which quickly became obsolete when Orkut was born. Then there was the age of Facebook, which changed the face of social media and the world has never been the same again. I am definitely in awe of Mark Zuckerberg’s revolutionizing creation but that is not the place where my addiction lies. For me, it is Facebook’s arm, Instagram!

To be honest, I am not a full-blown Instagram addict; however, I did get a distinct taste of it.

How it crept in

Every night, I try to sleep at 1 am, which is not so healthy in the first place, but I have to catch up on Netflix, another addiction of mine. These days I am romancing The Blacklist, where I am still trying to deduce who Raymond “Red” Reddington really is and trying to find out if Elizabeth Keen would finally make up her mind about Red. Sorry, I digress! Phew! Talk about having more than one addiction.

But after trying to catch some z’s after curbing one addiction, my hand suddenly moves to the Insta app, as it is popularly known, and I go down the rabbit hole yet again! For the nth number of times, before I know it, it’s 2.30 am, and I am already super uber late to sleep and having to get up early and go to work. Sorry dark circles, but Insta is important! Even after reading the warning that Insta sent me that I have caught up with my stories, I still feel the urge to scroll further hoping to find something I missed.

Thinking about the entire journey from getting hooked to letting go, I wouldn’t look down on me or anyone else addicted to social media. I have experienced that it is a difficult decision to stay away from social media. It is after all the need of the day! All my friends are a regular on Insta. If I don’t check my feed and stories, I am going to be clueless for a very big part of a conversation tomorrow.

Even my favorite celeb, Jennifer Aniston is now on Instagram. If I am not updated, how would I know what she did or said? How would I know what anyone is doing or where they have been? If this isn’t enough, I am subscribed (following) to a number of memes that make my day and zillion cat videos.

But it is not just about reading other’s stories; it’s also about sharing your own. A few days ago, I went for a run as I broke in my new Under Armour shoes after years of wearing Nike. A while into my run, I reached a serene woody area and before I knew it, I had this whole story created in my head how both my Nike and Under Armour are amazing for a run and how awesome it would be to capture an image of my new shoes in the woods and post it on Insta.

Innocent and usual, right! It was then that reality hit me of what had become of me. Instead of enjoying nature, my playlist, my run, and me time, I was obsessing about promoting Under Armour on my profile and trying to earn some brownie points. I realized that I needed to let go.

The breaking point

But I didn’t! A chance encounter with my Gen Z friends led to a very interesting conversation after I told them about how I felt the other day, and this is where things started unraveling. Little did I know what they were about to say.

This group of Gen Z, who are the real audience and content creators of social media, shared their own experiences about how they dreamt of living a day without Wi-Fi and how they would love a break from social media. Talk about digital fatigue and wanting to live off the grid! Gen Y feels visiting places is vacation, whereas Gen Z feels that living without the need for Wi-Fi is the new vacation.

They casually talked about how it felt to go outside, smell the air, and feel the breeze in their face. I live in Toronto, one of the most popular urban jungles in the world, but the city has managed to salvage its quaint nature. The city boasts quite a few parks, recreations, rivers, and nature trails; yet the social media addicts fail to leave the comfort of the Wi-Fi to make their vacation into an everyday reality.

They spoke about their comfort levels with Instagram and Twitter, with one of them admitting that he felt the compulsion to check his Twitter every 20 minutes or so just to see if there was some new content that he could update his social knowledge with. He went on to compare this habit to the compulsive need to open the refrigerator even when you need nothing from inside it.

As the conversations ran deeper, stories started popping up of how budding influencers/Gen Z go the extra mile to gain more followers. From a girl fearing that her zit would make her followers go run for the hills to the story about a girl carrying a several set of change of clothes and riding her motorcycle for 20 km to reach a river just so that she could get some good pictures taken for her profile; all this to retain the existing list of followers and probably get some new ones. Is this for real?

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

I decided that it was time to stop! It was time to get my sanity back and enjoy an extra hour and a half of sleep instead of going through endless memes (which are funny, I must admit).

Struggle to let go

I have been able to leave my addiction behind in the past. There have been times when I lived without Facebook for over a year and even when I deleted the notorious WhatsApp for a whopping three months. My husband and I were treated as primitive tribes as our friends found it incredibly difficult to reach us. We did eventually succumb to our need to be included in the social circle. After all, even our parents use Facebook and WhatsApp and we had deleted the apps!

This time, I was confident that it would be easy and no problem at all to do it all over again. Little did I know that I would show withdrawal effects. Jumping a few days ahead, it was difficult to stop me from rummaging through my phone desperately looking for an app that I can scroll. But I haven’t kept those bad boys on my phone anymore. Such is the force of habit that I check anything and everything from my bank account to my to-do-list to even refreshing my Gmail every 2 minutes only to enjoy the exhilaration of reading new content. When everything fails, I blankly scroll through my apps for the memory of the app that once was, Instagram.

Where I stand today

It’s been two weeks since I deleted Instagram and overcame the withdrawal effects. My fingers still twitch to scroll but I have been successful in controlling my nerves. When I told my Gen Z friends that I deleted the app, they laughed at me guaranteeing that this was just a phase and I would be back before I knew it. Are they right? Would I go back after fighting so hard to leave?

Maybe or maybe not, but I will take this one day at a time. But there is a big difference in this addiction. It has its negative effects like others but in other ways, it educates you, keeps you abreast, and connected with the world. In a way, it keeps you wanting for more. But is this necessary?

For me, it is. I am a content creator who needs to post her creativity and what better way to showcase your work than share it on social media. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, are all modes of communicating a story, and my content depends on it. My job requires me to be updated with social media so that I can reach out to my readers who scour for content like mine.

How can I differentiate my need from my addiction?

Photo by Emma Simpson on Unsplash

What I learned from this experience was that content is my world but social media need not be. Social media is tied to my job and will never fully allow me to disassociate myself from itself.

But, every once in a while, I can take a break and live in the real world. Catch up on a book instead of Netflix or meet a friend in real life instead of scrolling through their profile and DMing them. I may even try to be bold and live a Wi-Fi free day just to try and live on the edge. I most probably can enjoy a run for what it should be about.

There will be days when I have it in check but there will be days when I can get some help from the real-life support in my life to moderate and control the urge.