Disclaimer: I gotta admit that I failed sometimes. A handful of times I opened Youtube where I watched some kind of educational video, but afterwards clicked on short form content unconsciously and spent a few minutes on there until I noticed what I was doing. I think it is interesting to point out that I just clicked on it, basically automatically. So I wasn’t entirely „sober“. But remember that I am a computer science student so I still have to use my computer for studying and stuff.

My screentime report

• my average screentime was 33h for the week or 4h 47 min per day on all of my devices. (but technically it is 30h for the week and 4h 11 min per day because I let my phone on once and it was on for approximately three hours)
• Tennis TV - 11h 13min (I gotta shrink that down man)
• Safari - 5h 47min (mostly googling anything or bureaucratic stuff)
• Preview - 3h 52min (reading a book)
• Snapchat - 1h 42min (chatting with my girlfriend and friends)
• ATP WTA Live - 1h 36min
• Youtube - 1h 29min (mostly educational content but also like 20 min of SFV)
• ChatGPT - 1h 17 min (learning stuff, random questions)
• google.com - 1h 11min (probably googling stuff)
• Podcasts - 1h 6min (while commuting)
• Whatsapp - 59min … The remaining stuff is mostly educational or some kind of chat app which equals to the difference of 33h and the sum of the above listed times.

How do I feel generally?

I feel a lot better… I was more thoughtful of how I spent my time everyday. My perception is that I also have more motivation or my hunger regarding getting shit done and studying has gotten more. Maybe one could say that my desire for any kind of occupancy has shifted from social media content consumption to more important things that have a lasting impact on myself, at least in my humble opinion. Throughout the whole week I was in the gym almost every evening, went to bed earlier and was studying more. Time passed by slower and that felt great. Honestly I cannot believe only one week has passed, it feels more like 2 weeks. One fact that is probably the best to me out of all three is that I am way sharper, meaning less „brain fog“. I think more clearly, I am way wayyy more concentrated than I was before. A concrete example where I noticed it predominantly was when I read a book I often times found myself not reading actively, having anything in mind but not really taking something away from what I read. Now it got noticeably better, I was clearer, actively reading and understood what I was reading way quicker.

My thoughts on the screentime

Not gonna lie, just when I checked the screentime I was shocked little bit. I was anticipating something more like 14 hours for the week since I really haven’t spent too much time on my phone, mostly on my MacBook and the iPad. Thinking about the fact that one week has 168 hours, I was consuming ~15 hours of nonsense.

Connections of my perception to research

(1) A one week abstinence of social media caused a decrease of anxiety by 16%, depression by 25% and insomnia by 15%. Mental well-being, social-connectedness, self-esteem and life-satisfaction was boosted and FoMO was reduced according to Brown & Kuss (2020). Generally this can be labeled as a sudden loss of social rewards. Anna Lembke from Stanford says that, in the very first days of social media abstinence a spike in FoMO usually occurs due to the sudden loss of news, connectedness etc. This spike decreases heavily at least after three days. (2) Another study from Stanford did one of the largest social-media abstinence experiments where participants were paid to quit social-media for one week and six weeks, both six weeks ahead of the US election in 2024. Results suggested that users tended to substitute their time and focus to other smartphone apps instead of doing something entirely different. My opinion is that it depends on one’s own incentive. Whether the participant wanted to quit social media for his own good or whether he just took part in the study. This also has certain influence on how the results turn out to be. From my personal feelings and perspective I resonate more with (1). But again, I really wanted to quit social media because I saw a lot of my time going anywhere but where it should and that may be part of the reason why that is my current perspective.

Some funny facts that came to my mind

There is literally a multi-billion dollar industry to make people better their lifes, earn more money, perform better and feel better. In my opinion it is mostly a big scam. You can say whatever you want, I think that these people are mostly full of shit and live a lifestyle that they may sell but is not real and could never ever be reality. From what I know it is a snowball system, where people pay for access on some discord server or even a website to listen to talks and then get paid to promote the server of the owners just so they can get more people to pay for it and then the cycle starts again.

Conclusion

I am sure that other people report different experiences and would report have different results maybe because our understanding of the word social media addiction and just what too much social media means is not very well-defined. So I think that may be a reason and maybe some people do not put too much attention to this subject and think: "yeah whatever can a few videos do to me". For me personally I definitely want to keep this habit and even shrink down my screen-time by watching less sports or basically anything that has no meaning to it. My thought was to do another report after one month, which would be in three weeks, the weekend from 31st Jan to 1th Feb. After that we will see how often I will do reports but so far I am very happy where this experiment is going and I will probably never regret having made this decision.

I appreciate you deeply for your interest and thanks for reading!

Sources: University of Mannheim Stanford