A quick caveat before I begin: when I talk about taking a break from social media in this piece, I’m talking about platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Writing here on Substack feels very different to me. It feels slower, more thoughtful, and much less tied to the pressures that led me to step back in the first place. In fact, my relationship with Substack helped me think more clearly about how I want to engage with other platforms. ★
I have just come out of a self-imposed social media break, and it has left me feeling rather strange about that side of my life. A couple of weeks ago, I realised that the way I was using social media was not working. I was scrolling upon waking up, scrolling right before I fell asleep, scrolling during the gaps in my day to stave off the gnawing stress that’s been eating away at me during the final stretch of my PhD. A lot of the positive habits I’d built up were slipping, replaced by trying to constantly distract myself. Alongside consuming content, I was constantly thinking about what I would create next: what I’d film, what I’d post on my stories, whether I had enough content in the drafts to stretch across the next week. As a few other stressful parts of my life started to intensify, I could feel that my body was stuck in a state of fight-or-flight. And then I found myself thinking: hang on a minute. I could just stop.
To be clear, this was a temporary break. I have no intention of exiting social media forever, because I genuinely feel like social media brings many wonderful things into my life: opportunities to connect with and learn from intelligent, interesting people; a chance to express myself creatively; a way to share my academic work and ‘lift the curtain’ on grad school life. I’ve built genuinely wonderful friendships through this side of what I do, and I also feel proud of the community I’ve built through my content.
But lately I’ve felt that some of that good stuff has been overshadowed by an anxiety that’s been building up in me for a while.
The rest of this essay is for paid subscribers. I write about the pressure I’d started to feel around creating content, some conflicted feelings around monetisation, and why giving myself permission to take a break helped me evaluate how I think about social media. ★
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