Deep Dive ~ Why I quit Instagram

The ugly truth of what I was doing to myself for years

Like so many millennial women, I started my Instagram account in 2010; I was 19 and studying photography in college. Throughout my adulthood, I’ve never spent more than a few weeks logged out of my account – I’m 33 now.

What was once a delightful space for photography and community – two things I love more than anything – became an obsession tangled with self-doubt and self-hatred. It’s so gross to type that out and read it. But it’s true: I’ve spent the last few years hating how I feel about myself, because of my obsession with Instagram.

I’ll start with how it ended.

Dread had been haunting me for years. It started with my first miscarriage and tightened its grip on my creativity without me realizing it until earlier this year, when dread came up in postpartum therapy. I sort of blurted out to my therapist that I thought Instagram was a big source of dread in my life. She asked why Instagram had to be part of my life if it was so dreadful. For months, I tried to ignore that wise question, until one day I just said, that’s it, I’m done, today I quit. My last post was April 3, 2023.

I decided to leave Instagram without announcing it there. I’m telling it here because I’m a born sharer; in another generation I would have been a scrapbooker or advice columnist. But my fixation on sharing anything and everything that’s important to me on Instagram had taken me over.

I came to realize I was orienting every opinion, every photograph, every moment of my children’s childhoods, around Instagram. Everything I put into my Instagram – which was pretty much everything in my life – was also becoming tinted with shades of dread. Quiet self-hate when a post got less than a hundred likes. Bright red embarrassment when I shared about upcoming photography sessions and no one booked me, or even replied. I couldn’t stop using the app, but I couldn’t stop dreading it either. And because everything I was sharing there was braided into my own sense of self, I started dreading me.

Memory loss

Starting in mid-2020, I began using Instagram the way I’ve heard of people using alcohol to self-soothe. I’d purposely check it first thing in the morning to help me feel more awake, knowing it would trigger a dopamine release. I’d use it to force my mind away from something boring, like a commercial, or hard, like an exasperating parenting moment. Little did I know, I was rewiring my own brain.

My investment in the app was always attached to a good reason: I wanted to share to help others. (I had wonderful conversations with people I never would have met otherwise, and I really miss those conversations and people.) I liked sharing my artwork and photos, but desperately hoped that in so doing, I could book clients. (I rarely ever did.) One success: many Handpicked readers made their way here through Instagram! But all those countless hours scrolling, posting, studying, optimizing, planning, creating – I was just spinning my wheels. For years.

Beyond losing my groundedness, I noticed myself struggling to recall details. My doctor confirmed my suspicion that my obsessive use of the app was a major factor in my memory literally deteriorating. Dozens of times, I’ve been in conversation with my family and find myself with absolutely no recollection of childhood moments they’re referencing.

Once, on an especially sleep-deprived morning a few months ago, I forgot the name of my children’s pediatrician.

What quitting looked like

At first, I just deleted the app from my phone. After a month, I downloaded my archive and made my account private. Then, in June, I removed every single one of my 3,000~ followers, one at a time, and unfollowed 700+ accounts.¹ I chose this method, rather than deactivating my account, for a few reasons:

• Removing my followers/ following also removed the temptation of coming back. My popularity is gone, it would be useless to go back to Instagram for attention or validation – there’s none to be had. The one-by-one removal is insurance against reactivating and going right back to my old habit.

• I want to be able to access my own investment – the photos and captions – on my terms in the future, especially with my children.

• If anyone wants to search for me, they can find my account and follow the link to my online presence (this Substack, my blog, my photography portfolio).

The benefits

Everything about this essay, but especially this list of benefits, is very personal. I recognize that anyone reading this is going to disagree with some piece of it, and please know that I only apply this thinking to myself, not to anyone else. (Pretty much everyone I know and love is on Instagram!) Let me clearly state that I don’t think less of anyone for using the app.

The two biggest benefits of leaving are obviously a better relationship with myself and a ceasefire against my hippocampus.

Other benefits I’ve noticed since leaving:

1. I’ve stopped wasting so much time. This one is especially painful. I mean, when I think of the thousands of hours I spent using Instagram over the years…

2. I can quiet my mind without grabbing my phone. I’m learning to be okay with that boring feeling I used to have staring out the window on the school bus. I’d always lecture my kids that “boredom is good for you! It forces you to be creative!” while coddling my own boredom by feeding it Instagram snacks at all times. Bad bad bad. I still hate boredom, but my kids are teaching me how to handle it better.

3. I don’t worry about my kids’ online privacy. I’ve never landed on a good solution – I either felt like I was oversharing or undersharing. I just want to do right by them.

4. I don’t want my kids to use social media. Some of the most sound parenting advice I’ve ever gotten is, “Don’t ask your children to do something you aren’t willing to do yourself.” They’ll be teenagers soon-ish so the need felt pressing.

5. I buy less stuff. Of course I still shop plenty, but I make fewer impulse purchases now.

6. I don’t hate my postpartum body so much. I still have trouble with comparing my body to others’, but, away from Instagram, it’s way less in the back of my mind all the time. Not only that, but I always felt like I was never as stylish as That Influencer Over There; over the years I unfollowed lots of influencers because I was so jealous of them. Now I find myself taking style cues from friends, Pinterest, and characters in TV shows. Has quitting Instagram cured my body dysmorphia? Not exactly, but I’ve made a lot of progress.

7. A HUGE benefit: no more vicious comments. People said some really, really horrible things to me on Instagram. Having especially personal posts get hateful, angry comments is something I’m very relieved I don’t have to deal with anymore. For example, the few times I did anonymous Q&A boxes via NGL, people submitted unbelievably cruel comments and questions, such as this one: “I’ve seen you yell at your kids in public before. Do you really think you should be having another baby?” That came in about a week after I announced I was pregnant.

What I miss: DMs. Catching up on my friends’ lives. The journal-esque aspect. Art. Interesting knowledge from people like Sharon Says So. The strength of others saying “I know how you feel” after sharing openly about super hard challenges. Sharing my latest roll of film. Having a place to learn directly from folks who share their perspective on life different from mine as a suburban white straight cis woman.

Losing identity

For years – years – I felt like I loser. My posts didn’t “perform well,” my audience didn’t “grow,” I lost followers all the time. The attention I gave my account earned me a couple hundreds dollars over the decade+ I spent investing in it. I’d catch myself refreshing my feed for the twentieth time in an hour, then criticize myself for not being good at enough at this bizarre sport. Loser.

It makes me sick to think of the hundreds of hours of my children’s childhoods I’ve spent devouring a bottomless feed. Eleanor is nine now – halfway to adulthood. All that time I threw away, chasing some ambiguous, impossible carrot. That is the real loss.

Where we go from here

SIGH if you’ve made it this far, bless your soul. The last thing I’ll say is, I feel so much better. It’s a quiet kind of better. The dread has mostly vanished, my creativity doesn’t feel attached to anything else, and I like myself. Of course there’s a lot that’s contributed to these self-improvements. But it would be a big mistake to undercut the identity-saving benefits of quitting Instagram.

Nowadays I feel an implicit sense of lightness, confidence, and freedom. And at 33, that peace is so precious, I can’t imagine giving it up.

1. My account still exists and is set to private. The only followers I didn’t remove are my immediate family. Keeping a few connections active lessens the likelihood that Instagram would suspend my account for inactivity/ spam, which would prevent me from accessing my 2,200+ posts.