Friends getting engaged, strangers buying houses, someone my age hiking volcanoes at sunrise — all of it streamed into my pocket like weather. One morning, after a night of thumb-twitching insomnia, I did something I hadn’t done in years. I held my breath, pressed the little cross on my home screen, and watched the Instagram icon wobble before it vanished.
The next thing I noticed wasn’t silence. It was space. Space where a thousand tiny judgements used to buzz around my head. Space to taste my coffee before photographing it. Space to walk to the tube without comparing my life to a perfect stranger’s living room.
I didn’t quit out of virtue. I quit because my anxiety had begun to feel baked-in, like damp in an old flat. I wanted to know who I was without the scroll. Then something odd happened.
When the noise stops
The first week felt like stepping off a treadmill that had been running under my feet for years. My brain kept leaning forward, expecting a new post, a new notification, a new reason to tense my jaw. Instead there was a sort of hum — the gentle hum of a normal day. *My chest stopped buzzing.* I realised I’d been carrying a quiet flinch in my body, like I was braced for a tap on the shoulder that never came.
I started clocking the difference in small places. On the bus, where I used to scroll away entire journeys, I found myself watching a kid count the number of red cars out loud. In the kitchen, I finished an entire song without skipping. Screen-time dropped by nearly two hours a day in week one, and the late-night spirals went with it. A 2022 university study found a one-week social media break improved anxiety and wellbeing; I could feel why. The gains were weirdly physical.
There’s a simple logic to it. Instagram isn’t just pictures; it’s intermittent rewards, social comparison, and a stream of social cues we’d never meet in real life at that speed. Each fresh post is a maybe — this one will make me laugh, this one will make me wince — and that maybe keeps you running. Your nervous system stays on high alert. Remove the slot machine, and the body stops bracing. I realised my anxiety wasn’t always “about” something. It was a rhythm I’d trained into myself without meaning to.
How to make a month off actually stick
I gave myself rules, because willpower melts after midnight. I deleted the app and my saved password, then added a blocker to the website on mobile and desktop. I shifted my phone to grey-scale, moved it out of the bedroom, and set “dead hours” from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. Most of all, I made swaps. Mornings got a notebook on the table. Commutes got a playlist. Waiting rooms got a book I actually wanted to read.
Cravings arrived in waves, especially at social moments. My thumb went looking for the app with muscle memory, like reaching for a light switch in an old flat. When I slipped, I didn’t start over from zero. I named it, laughed at it, and went back to the plan. We all know that moment when a quick check becomes a lost hour. So I built speed bumps: a post-it on my lock screen that said “Why?”, a coffee mug next to my charger, walks around the block when I felt that twitchy itch. Let’s be honest: nobody really does this every day.
What surprised me was the calm that followed the self-boundaries. A gentle steadiness arrived after I stopped bargaining with myself every ten minutes. I got less scattered at work, kinder in real conversations, and oddly proud of the quiet little streak on my calendar.
“Anxiety loves open tabs. Close some, and your mind stops sprinting.”
- Delete the app, remove the saved password, and add a blocker for the web version.
- Pick two daily “replacement rituals” — one for mornings, one for evenings.
- Set dead hours and put the phone in another room, even for 30 minutes.
- Make a low-effort craving list: sip water, stand outside, text one real person.
- Measure by days you felt calm, not days you were “perfect”.
What 30 days taught me about attention and peace
By week three, I noticed a strange freedom: I wasn’t living with a panel of invisible judges. Without the constant parade of other people’s milestones, my own pace felt less embarrassing. I said yes to slower things. I cooked a daft, over-salted stew. I took a train without filming the view. The best bit wasn’t that I had more time. It was that my attention came back to me like a dog that had run too far and finally found its way home. I became less jumpy, less grabby, and more willing to be bored. **It turned out my anxiety was not my personality; it was a habit.** And a habit can be retrained.
On day 30 I reinstalled Instagram, curious and a little wary. The feed felt louder than I remembered, like walking into a pub at full tilt after a week in the countryside. I didn’t swear it off for ever. I set it to weekends only, trimmed who I followed to people I genuinely care about, and hid most stories. Small fences, big gains. **Quiet is strangely addictive once you’ve had a taste.**
What stayed with me wasn’t a moral lesson about phones. I like the internet. It’s how I find recipes and book trains and send my nieces silly cat videos. **But scrolling is a slot machine in your pocket**, and my month off was me stepping away from the fruit machine to remember how a slow day feels. Anxiety still visits, because life is life. It no longer rides shotgun all day.
There are a few blunt truths I learned. Reassurance by scrolling doesn’t work because it asks you to drink salt water when you’re thirsty. The more you look, the more you want. The fix is not heroic discipline. It’s designing a life with fewer frictions and kinder defaults. A phone in another room. A book by your keys. A friend on speed dial. Tiny, slightly boring safeguards that add up to a lighter brain.
I also learned that a good day doesn’t announce itself with fireworks. It sneaks in through the small, uncool wins: a kettle boiled without a quick check, a conversation you actually finish, the bus window you watch like a film. The absence of a constant drip of other people’s lives lets your own life fill the room. That’s the surprising bit. There’s nothing dramatic about it. But drama stops running your body.
I still take photos of sunsets, sometimes. I still get jealous, sometimes. I still feel that tug to “just check” what everyone else is doing. The difference is that I’ve met the other feeling now — the one that waits on the far side of the scroll. The one that says: breathe, then choose. The one that doesn’t need an audience.
Maybe your month off won’t look like mine. Maybe it’s a week, or weekends, or evenings after dinner. Maybe you’ll slip and start again on a Tuesday afternoon with crumbs on your jumper and a train to catch. That’s fine. The point is to see what your mind feels like without the feed running in the background. To notice how quickly the body unclenches when you stop asking it to live in a never-ending crowd. There’s something tender in that quiet. It belongs to you.
| Point clé | Détail | Intérêt pour le lecteur |
|---|---|---|
| Créer des “dead hours” | Plages sans réseau (9 p.m.–9 a.m.) + téléphone hors de la chambre | Sommeil plus profond, moins de ruminations nocturnes |
| Remplacer, pas juste retirer | Rituels de remplacement: carnet, musique, marche courte | Réduit les rechutes, rend l’habitude agréable |
| Réduire la friction d’accès | Supprimer l’app, mots de passe, blocage du site | Moins d’impulsions, plus de calme automatique |
FAQ :
- Do I have to delete my account to feel a difference?No. Start with deleting the app and blocking the site. Keep your account for later. The relief comes from breaking the instant loop, not from going off-grid.
- What if my job needs Instagram?Ringfence it. Use a separate work phone or a browser-only session at set times. Keep personal scrolling off your main device and treat posting as a task, not a pastime.
- How long before anxiety starts to drop?Many people notice changes within a week. Sleep improves first, then focus, then mood. Give it 14 days before you judge the experiment.
- Won’t I miss important updates from friends?You’ll miss a few stories, yes. You’ll gain real check-ins. Text, call, meet. Genuine connections get louder when the feed gets quieter.
- What if I relapse and binge-scroll?Name it, don’t shame it. Close the tab, do one replacement action, and move on. Treat it like training a muscle — small, repeated resets beat grand promises.
