Some people decide to quit social media and they take that first step by uninstalling a social media app or deactivating their account. This is a great start, but many discover that it's easy to reinstall apps and re-activate their social media accounts. 

This leads many of our customers ask, "how do I quit social media for good?" The answer to this question is not always straightforward, so for everyone's benefit, here are several strategies that Tech Lockdown readers might find useful.

However, before talking about how to quit, start by understanding some of the problems that are connected to compulsive social media use:

1. Reduced impulse control and difficulty delaying gratification.
2. Endless scrolling feeds are like junk food, but you overstuff on unhealthy sources of dopamine and feel like you are dependent on social media.
3. For people trying to quit adult content , regular use of social media can make this goal even more difficult to achieve.  
4. It's possible to fall into toxic community or friend groups.

You can rephrase the above points to focus on what you would gain by quitting social media rather than what you feel you are giving up.

How Do I Know My Social Media Usage is a Problem?

When I began addressing the issues that I had with social media, I confronted myself with some important questions:

1. Do I feel anxious without social media (or does the thought of it getting taken away sound stressful)?
2. Do my conversations with people face-to-face feel too slow?
3. Do I experience "withdrawal" symptoms when I can't use social media?
4. Do I feel the constant urge to multitask? 

As someone who struggled with feeling the need to be chronically online, I would have answered yes to all of these questions. 

The next step for me was to take a look at my app usage. I found that I was easily spending 3+ hours a day scrolling through my various social media apps. 

The trap I kept falling into was comparing my social media usage to the average. As long as I didn't go over 4 hours per day, I felt like I was doing okay. It was only when I started trying to limit my own usage that I realized I might have a problem.

I started to encounter "withdrawal" symptoms. I would argue that if you also experience withdrawal symptoms when you try to quit, then your social media usage it at least heading downhill.

What Are the Social Media Withdrawal Symptoms?

For most people, social media gives them something to do. When this is taken away from you, everything starts to feel boring, anxious, lonely, or frustrating. However, withdrawal goes much deeper than that.

Withdrawals of any kind (whether it be from social media, coffee, or alcohol) usually present themselves as the polar opposite emotion as the cue provides. YouTube or TikTok provides you with entertainment, which means you'll start feeling bored otherwise. If you open Facebook to connect with people, then you start feeling lonely without it.

Personally, without social media, I would start to feel anxious. It was bad enough that in order to quit, I had to limit my usage bit by bit. 

How Do I Prevent or Attack Social Media Withdrawals?

There are two main ways to confront social media withdrawals:

1. Cut out social media altogether, all at once. This is the "rip off the Band-Aid" approach.
2. Slowly but surely trim down your usage, one week at a time.

We strongly recommend taking the first option, but it can be a bit daunting. If you instead, start attacking the problem bit by bit, it will take longer, but many people might prefer it.

How Do I Quit Social Media Altogether?

Quitting social media might feel difficult at first, but it's completely possible.

Here are some strategies you can use to help:

1. Start out by trimming down your usage, one week at a time, by using our strategies to make social media usage less appealing and accessible.
2. Cut out social media altogether by de-activating your account and ultimately blocking the social media apps and websites.

Let's get started by learning how to trim down social media usage and then block it entirely.

Make your Smartphone Less Appealing

One of the reasons that compulsive social media usage is so common on smartphones is that your smartphone is an expert at training you to check it and feel uncomfortable when you don't.

Give yourself a better chance at quitting social media entirely by reducing the appeal of your smartphone and ultimately reduce your screen time . 

One way to achieve this is to make your phone less appealing by customizing your smartphone into a  dumber phone . A dumb phone is a smart phone with all of the distracting features removed.

In the most extreme cases, some people have made the switch to a flip phone. However, most of us still want to use a GPS or Camera, so making your own dumb phone is a much better idea.

• For Android smartphone users, you have a lot of options available to you. You can install a minimal custom launcher, enable grayscale, remove the Google Play store, and more.
• iPhone users can also make their own dumb iPhone. Enable grayscale, disable the app store , and set significant limitations for apps and internet browsing.

Make your Social Media App Less Appealing

Enabling the grayscale color scheme on your smartphone is one way to make social media less appealing since the images and videos won't reward you as much without the bright and vibrant colors.

You can go even further by customizing some of the social media platforms to make them less interesting. One way to do this is by blocking images and videos.

For example, you could add a rule to your DNS Content Policy that blocks YouTube images.

This is an excellent way to make YouTube less appealing since you won't see the clickbait thumbnails that draw you in.

Furthermore, this is an ideal way to filter content on YouTube since the lack of thumbnails will make it harder to discover problematic content.

You can use a similar approach to block media on X (formally Twitter), Discord, and Reddit.

Learn more about how to filter social media content:

1. X (Twitter)
2. YouTube
3. Discord
4. Reddit

Schedule your Social Media Usage

Instead of blocking social media all at once, you could choose to cut it out of the times where you need to stay focused. 

We recommend that you do two things:

1. Set a schedule when social media can be accessed
2. Combine this with app time limits

Get started by picking time slots where you want to limit your access to social media. A lunch break could be a good time to give yourself that access.

Then, create a  scheduled DNS Content Policy rule , that specifies the social media apps that should be blocked on a regular schedule.

I wanted to stop myself from waking up and immediately opening my phone, so scheduling helped me break that habit. 

Another advantage to using a DNS Content policy to schedule usage is that you can impose self-restrictions that make it harder to compulsively change or bypass your own schedules. For example, if you set a DNS Content Policy with Tech Lockdown, you are able to lock your profile , so that you can't easily change your settings in the moment.

You can also use Apple Screen Time  or Google Digital Well Being (Android) to set app time limits, which are even better when combined with scheduled usage.

By the way, you should also set similar app time limits for the browser on your phone. This ensures that you don't try to bypass time restrictions by accessing the social media websites in your phone's browser.

Block Social Media Entirely

If you want to block social media apps (or just one in particular), we have guides available for free for those interested. The techniques in these guides allow you to block both the app and website for each platform you are interested in blocking, while allowing more useful platforms.

Our approach combines traditional screen time or parental control features with a DNS Content Policy . If you rely exclusively on parental controls (or screen time), you'll quickly find that they're not enough for several reasons:

1. Parental Controls are limited and difficult to set up. If you're self-managing, some important features are missing (for example, you can't block the Settings app). You will also need to set up multiple accounts.
2. Screen Time is not stronger than you. You can easily change your own settings, even if it's bad for you.

Instead, you need to install a DNS filter on your devices, one that's powerful enough to help you say no. Tech Lockdown's filter offers the ability to lock your profile , so that you can't easily undo your rules.

Even if you don't want to cut out social media all at once, you can still consider using scheduled rules to more effectively quit social media.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some common questions related to quitting social media that we get.

Can I Block NSFW Content on Social Media?

Another common question we get is whether it's possible to just block NSFW content on social media. This seems like it should be straightforward, but unfortunately, most platforms don't offer this ability.

There are some exceptions, for example:

• Reddit lets you hide content marked as "NSFW". This will hide both posts (such as images and videos) and subreddits that have been properly labeled. By default, this kind of content will be blurred out, but you can hide it entirely in settings.
• YouTube lets you set a restricted mode to strict. This can usually be enabled through settings, but it's very easy to revert later. You can also enforce strict mode outside of the platform so it's significantly more difficult to disable.
• Twitter's adult content filter lets you hide explicit search results and comments or profiles. 
• The Discord explicit content filter works in a similar way to Twitter.

Some platforms also handle content differently if the account has an age under 13. You might be able to try this, however, it's usually not very effective. It's very easy to just sign out of the account and browse as a guest user.

My Smartphone's Screen Time Feature is too easy to bypass

A common problem people run into is that the built-in screen time features, like Digital Wellbeing and Apple Screen Time, are fairly easy to bypass if you are the phone owner. However, it is possible to work around screen time limitations . 

This is one reason we recommend combining the built-in parental control settings with a DNS Content Policy.

If you block a social media app with your DNS Content Policy, you can enforce the DNS Filtering app by setting the option to Don't allow deleting apps.

This adds more steps to bypassing the screen time enforcement.

Furthermore, you can use Apple's alternative to Screen Time : supervised device mode. This allows you to create app blocklists that are much harder to bypass compared to Screen Time.

These device management techniques can be confusing, so we've made step-by-step instructions available to Tech Lockdown members in the guides section of their account.