How to do a social media detox (and what to do after)

Choose your kind of detox

• Full: no social media at all for a set time. A weekend, a week or 30 days are common choices.
• One platform: take a break from the one that drains you most, and keep the rest.
• Set hours: nothing before noon, say, or nothing after 9 p.m.
• Off the phone: delete the apps from your phone and check in only on a computer, once a day. Checking becomes something you decide to do, not something your thumb does on its own.

Write down why you’re doing it, and what you want more of: reading, time with people, a quieter head. It helps to have that in front of you when the first few days get restless.

Set it up

1. Pick a start and an end date. A fixed end makes it a break rather than a goodbye.
2. Delete the apps from your phone, or at least sign out. Your account stays exactly as it is.
3. Turn off email and push notifications from each platform, since they’re there to pull you back in.
4. Tell people how to reach you, by text or phone, so you don’t feel you have to check.
5. Block the websites too if you tend to switch to the browser instead. See how to block websites on Chrome.
6. Plan what fills the gap. Scrolling usually fills waiting, winding down or putting something off. Have a book, a podcast or a walk ready for those moments.

You don’t need to deactivate anything. If you do, be careful on X: deactivating starts a 30-day countdown, after which the account is permanently deleted. Instagram lets you deactivate temporarily, which hides your profile until you sign back in.

What to expect

• Reaching for your phone on autopilot. You’ll pick it up and tap where the app used to be. That’s the habit showing itself, and noticing it is useful.
• Restlessness and boredom, especially in the moments you used to scroll: in line, on the couch, in bed. This is the part to plan for.
• Fear of missing out. You will miss some things. Most of it will still be there when you get back, and news that really matters tends to reach you through people anyway.
• More time than you expected, often in small pieces.
• Maybe not a dramatic change. Some people feel transformed; others mostly feel a bit calmer. Either way, you’ll learn what you actually missed, and that’s the useful part.

Coming back

Notice what you missed and what you didn’t. Then come back on purpose:

• Return to one platform at a time.
• Before you scroll, unfollow or mute anything you didn’t miss.
• Keep notifications off.
• If keeping the apps off your phone worked, keep it that way.

If you find yourself sliding back into long sessions, these habits help with doomscrolling.

The alternative: keep the good parts

For a lot of people, the problem isn’t social media as a whole. It’s a few kinds of posts: rage bait, the news cycle, diet talk, someone you’d rather not see. Quitting removes those, but it also removes the friends, hobbies and communities you like.

So instead of a detox, or after one, you can change what you see: unfollow and mute, mark things “Not interested”, mute words, and reset recommendations that have gone wrong. Our step-by-step plan to clean up your social media feed goes through each platform.

Questions