Quitting Instagram, nervous system regulation and digital minimalism
how social media addiction spurred me to regulate my nervous system
Instagram is toxic to the nervous system and I’m not afraid to say it.
So I quit.
And it wasn’t easy.
Prepare to have a long attention span because boy, is this an ESSAY.
Over the years, this quitting process has been stop and go. Saying no to all things toxic and then returning. In this post I will describe my struggle with social media addiction and how it reflected and influenced my levels of nervous system regulation.
May it liberate and empower you if you’re on the same journey. Here goes months of writing and refining.
How social media started for me
As a teen, I had Myspace and MSN. Putting lyrics in my name to share how I felt and everything. So yes, that accurately dates me as a millennial. Then, in my twenties, I had Facebook and a public Instagram account for my 3-ish real friends and a flurry of random ex-classmates and people I met while traveling that I apparently still wanted to impress but had no connection to whatsoever.
One of the things I am the most grateful for in life, is that I became an adult before social media really took hold, so I never got hooked on a personal level too much. With my sensitivity, if I had been born in Gen Z, I don’t know if I could have withstood it. I would have been like the hungry ghost (love that book by Gabor Maté) from Spirited Away in that spa full of greedy people, growing from a friendly ghost into a monster. I love that the girl says to him ‘this was not a good place for you’. I found it to be such a compassionate statement. It shows that the wrong environment can really bring out the wrong behavior.
And when we talk about fast-paced social media platforms, we are talking about a platform that is designed to turn us into a hungry ghost. And even though I came into it as an adult, I was more addicted than I like to admit.
The difficult thing was, even though I was just about mature enough to not be as susceptible to the pitfalls of social media on the level of my personal life, I stayed on these platforms for business reasons, which would turn out to be the bane of my existence. I didn’t yet know what ‘intermittent reinforcement’ was - that pattern in which you only get rewarded sometimes, and you can’t predict when that is, so you get obsessed.
No matter how much of my soul I bared as a spiritual entrepreneur, my Facebook career was a flop. I never got more than a few hundred ‘friends’ and even when I paid for Facebook ads, I mostly got crickets. I sold my paintings only because I had been featured in a well-known Dutch online magazine (Happinez). So, the decision to finally delete my Facebook in 2019, was the first time I broke with the intermittent reinforcement pattern. No one from my Facebook ‘friends’ contacted me, and I didn’t feel the need to contact them. My first attempt at social media had failed.
I could have left it at that.
But I had gotten the hunger.
Enter the ‘Instagram glamour guru’
I had seen the images of making easy money as an Instagram influencer. Right now, I am cringing so hard. But yeah, I wanted that. To be that glamour guru - and I mean guru as in spiritual entrepreneur. A whole brand of people that I will definitely roast in just a minute.
But in all seriousness, if I could make this work for me, it would fit perfectly with my low energy levels. I could work from home and do what I love: being creative and doing spiritual work. My life was all about healing in my twenties, so might as well pass it on.
So I tried again to do business online. For Instagram, I came up with a carefully curated spirtual brand (think: soothing voice, flowing dresses and deep contemplations about how everything is abundance in the hopes of selling stuff to people, but also authenticity) and got way more engagement there - a modest amount of 800+ followers - that provided me with a small income.
It was also genuine and I had fun, just to be clear.
Although it was the main source of clients for my business, over the years this platform enhanced my stress levels, my short attention span and overall nervous system dysregulation, leading to anxiety, as it does for so many people. Pair this with an involvement in the world of ‘feminine business coaches’ which made me try to compete from a place of toxic shame, and you have a recipe for a deep, downward spiral. I got addicted to the intermittent reinforcement pattern again, which worsened the more the platform enshittificated (which apparently is a real word).
Healthy boundaries with the platform blurred. I was always reaching for my phone, in a ‘flight’ pattern, trying to be busy, busy, busy creating new content all the time, because I had money stress. It was purely about survival.
I thought I had to do what all these feminine business coaches did in marketing. Identity branding: glamorize myself (but in a spiritual, authentic way) to show an image of success, ‘manifest abundance’ by endlessly working on myself to find blocks and somehow not lose my self-worth in the process, equate how much money I made to how enlightened I was, always trying to be grateful on a platform that, by design, takes us out of our natural state of restful abundance by activating our survival physiology…
It disgusts me now.
(And hey, if it works for you, that is great, I’m just sharing my own experience and feelings and the shadow that I got hooked into and I am also j o k i n g.)
Long story short, when I learned that money, sexuality, followers, receiving and worth are actually NOT connected in this toxic way that many of these influencers (and the algorithm itself, through rewarding it) propagate, but way more complex and personal, I was able to take my distance. Within a few months, I quit my public page on Instagram to move to slower-paced YouTube. There, my stress levels dropped, because YouTube promotes long-form content and let’s just ignore the shorts.
That Instagram page still existed because it was a valuable archive of my growth that I didn’t have the heart to eradicate, but I made it private and inactive and culled the followers back to a 100 or so. It was very therapeutic to remove these 700 followers, one by one, sending them an energetic ‘thank you’ and feeling their energy leave my life. There were bots, and a lot of the humans had funky energies anyway.
I learned an important lesson in the vein of ‘we’re only meant to know about 150 people because that’s how big villages were in the past’.
Orienting to who was in my online space helped me realize which energies that were floating around in my field weren’t mine and how they had impacted me. Taking control of who I wanted in ALL of my spaces, both offline AND online, did more for my energetic hygiene than I had anticipated.
After this culling, I deleted the app from my phone and went without Instagram completely. In that month, I felt so, so calm and like myself. This was about a year ago. Being on YouTube instead generally agreed with me. I had a big ass recuperation time, like the hungry ghost that ends up living with the nice witch in the woods doing crafting activities. Although I didn’t knit, I did pick up sewing and have since made a trousers and it’s my FAVORITE PIECE OF CLOTHING.
Keeping social media and my private life separate
When I made my page on Instagram inactive, I also separated my personal life from social media completely. I no longer followed any of my friends online, and they of course couldn’t follow me anymore either.
I actually preferred catching up in person. Not knowing anything that happened in my friends’ lives, so I could be surprised - and vice versa. It was sweet to return to that kind of relating before social media. I also quit my turned-toxic habit of exchanging long and hefty texts and voice notes with friends. I didn’t want to have most of my meaningful connection happen on a phone. I decided I only wanted to use texting for setting a time and date to meet. Not everyone was a match to this - it caused some drama with someone that wanted to vent through texting and she broke up with me. So I said my goodbyes.
For many people, social media is a way to stay connected to their community.
It can be tricky or messy to completely extract ourselves from the platform because of this. But if we want to quit, I believe that the right people will understand, and stick with us in another way. Some people might just fall away - but what kind of value did they add to our life to begin with, and do we even know what kind of value we added to theirs? I personally felt it was a drain to have this kind of superficial relating in my life. It was mostly an exhausting game of comparison and a whole bunch of unnecessary white noise.
Going back to Instagram
You must be thinking: wow, was she a wise and superior millennial, going back to nature and all that!
But low and behold, I returned to Instagram!!!
Why?!
Early spring ‘24, I started up a new Instagram page (or rather, revived an old small business page that I had used as a private membership before). I chose to go back because:
I missed following certain people that I couldn’t connect to anywhere else.
I missed creating content through the intuitive flow I was used to on Instagram.
These were valid reasons for me.
But in order to not get caught in the trap, I had to set new boundaries.
For reason #1, I only followed around 30 people at a time. I regularly followed and unfollowed, or switched off people’s stories and posts. This helped me minimize what I was exposed to on my timeline.
For reason #2, I really didn’t want that same feeling of ‘shouting into the void’, with posts not being shown to most followers, Instagram only keeping content alive for 21 hrs, ie. what’s called ‘enshittification’. So, I decided to cheat the platform. I only used a private page as a membership, as I had done before. In other words: a small group of people paid me to get access to quality content like guided live meditations and healing reels, specifically attuned to them. It was a way for me to say goodbye to a platform that had been a big part of my life. To use it one last time in such a gratifying way where instead of being chronically undervalued by a soulless algorithm to create income for Meta through my free labor, I created my own income from it instead by creating content I didn’t have to hold back on sharing with a beautiful little community. I hacked it!
So far, so good.
But I got bold. I saw cool meme accounts in the Human Design community and I wanted in. (Remember that friendship breakup? I had multiple difficult friendship endings and I needed to recover from that and these memes helped me, even though I didn’t realize that at the time.) So I started a little public Human Design meme account that I had for 5 months or so.
And then the doomscrolling returned
Because I now had 2 accounts, followed 30 people on both of them and went on the timeline to see their posts, I got hooked in by that oh so clever slot machine again. I found myself doomscrolling more and more. I would get on my phone for ‘noble reasons’, like interesting YouTube videos or podcasts, but if there was a boring part, I would go on Instagram and overwhelm myself with random input as I listened. And sometimes I went into a rabbit hole by tapping on story links which opened up whole new rabbit holes of comparing myself to strangers - podcast paused and long forgotten.
That sneaky Instagram cat had gotten its paws in me again and the algorithm was laughing its ass off. Here I was, thinking I was immune, with my ‘boundaries’ and my ‘awareness’. Ha ha ha.
“Time for disappearing, blow up your devices”
I deliberated on what to do. While the need to blow up my device (like in this song, music starts at 1.28, please listen if you like Dexter) was tempting, avoiding Instagram altogether would mean I missed out on updates that contributed something to my life, from people I couldn’t/didn’t want to connect to in any other way. There were about 5 of them.
New boundaries needed with Instagram, once again. But I didn’t want to fall back into the same trap with the scrolling. So boundaries 2.0. Mega boundaries. I built a whole fortress of boundaries. And finally, they worked. This is what I did:
I decided to fully delete my public Human Design meme account, after doing some shadow work and realizing I had gotten it for the wrong reason (publicly processing friendship breakups is not a good idea).
I kept the other - private - one, even after the group membership ended. Not to create any new content myself anymore (that need had been fulfilled and completed), but to be able to check the 5 specific people’s accounts and still be able to like their posts to support them.
I deleted Instagram from my phone and from now on, only went on the website on my laptop. I have an adblocker on Firefox. The adfree version makes Instagram way better to digest and the bigger laptop screen gives me space to see everything.
I don’t follow anyone. I only go directly onto people’s accounts, either through bookmarks, my webbrowser remembering the link or because Instagram remembered the account when I typed it into its search bar before. Because I don’t follow anyone, when I go on instagram.com now, I only see a long list of recommended accounts - which I avoid. (It always includes that account that no one deleted from my uncle that has passed away - a weird and tragic reminder that I don’t need.) This is because I don’t want Instagram to dish me recommended content in any kind of way.
I do not aspire to have any kind of relationship to the algorithm, because that’s an abusive relationship based on intermittent reinforcement, plain and simple. Instagram constantly seeks to rile us up into fight/flight by showing us enraging/sensationalized posts, then love-bombing us with soothing content, then riling us up again… no thanks. And when I talk about a ‘relationship’ in this context: we really do have a relationship to everything in our life, including our devices and our social media.
So I don’t follow anyone with the follow button. I have 5 accounts that I regularly check out, about once a week, and sometimes a place I want to visit only has announcements on Instagram, not on their website, so it’s nice to have an account for practical reasons too. You can’t really open Instagram posts if you don’t have an account. Also, by having an account still, I can support these accounts with likes, even though I don’t follow them - giving something back is important to me even if it’s small.
Now, my visits to Instagram are like guerilla attacks. They last 10 minutes tops about once a week, so that’s under an hour a month. I like those numbers.
So I am extremely intentional with it. This might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I feel like I hacked it for real now. Maybe it offers you some ideas. And if you’re happy with your Instagram use, feel free to ignore.
Sooo… how does it feel?
First of all: I feel a deep, visceral PEACE. I now remember everything I did online at the end of the day, while before, it was a blur. How cool is that?!
What I notice is that I don’t have a lot of tolerance anymore to stay on Instagram for long. If I have caught up with my 5 accounts on my laptop, I am already full, or even overstimulated.
It reminds me of when I quit eating processed sugar. Before, I would have no trouble eating lots of cookies, because my whole diet was infused with sugar. But after I quit, eating only a small amount of processed sugar could throw my system off and I definitely didn’t want more.
Same with Instagram content. Like sugar, it is ultra-high processed. Now that I am no longer addicted and numbed out to it, I realize how intense just watching 10 stories actually is! Especially if you let them go at their own pace. It is overwhelming to me to see 10 seconds of a reel, then 20 seconds of another, then read the first part of a story, then 2 more seconds of another reel, go back to read the whole story, then finish that reel… and get dished 6 different people’s energy in the span of 30 seconds!
I can only do it in small doses now. And then I might spend way more time on one thing - rewatching the reel, rereading the post, really savor it. Needless to say that there aren’t a lot of accounts that are worthy of this focused attention. Instagram just isn’t set up to support that.
What to do with all that free time?
Quitting the Instagram slot machine once and for all, I was also aware that I now consciously needed to create alternatives, or there would be a hole and I’d be less likely to completely wean off. One of these things was switching to Substack, which I’m surprised how much I like! It definitely provides more in-depth quality content and fulfills my need for inspiration, new ideas and impersonal worldwide connection so much more.
(On my ‘notes’ timeline here, there are a lot of self-congratulatory posts about how Substack is different and celebrating both low subs or high subs, which seems the way this specific platform is designed to hook in and what the algorithm rewards, best to not get swept up in all that too much - but hey, I got a post out of it!)
I also focus more on my offline hobbies.
I joined the library after not being a member for years. In the winter, a few of my other hobbies are: 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles, drawing, board games, nature walks and watching arthouse movies. I really recommend ‘Paterson’ and ‘Perfect Days’ if you want to watch something peaceful that slows you all the way down. I also have a little puzzle game where I need to fit pieces into a box which improves my intelligence, or so it says. Having all these toys lying around in the living room helps me to be able to ‘respond’ to something, because I am just a big child that gets bored sometimes. Aren’t we all? In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, ‘being an adult is just being bored but remain standing’.
In the summer, I add gardening to this list and I play a lot outside, preferably with baby animals.
I also journal a lot more - where I used to pump out content and consume it, I now do more introspection, in solitude. I didn’t know I craved so much of that.
Exploratory orienting vs. hypervigilance
Something else that I rediscovered: just sitting there and looking around the room. This actually regulates our nervous system. It’s called ‘exploratory orienting’ in the world of nervous system work which is the thing I’m currently nerding out about, as opposed to ‘defensive orienting’ which we do when we are scanning for danger (like bracing for outraging content online).
It is crazy how the simple act of looking around has become such a forgotten art for smartphone users! As a child I (we?) did this naturally. There often wasn’t much else to do in between things. I would just sit there on the couch and stare at weird spots on the ceiling, or twist my hands in new, interesting ways, playing with reflections in mirroring surfaces of the furniture. You know, the kind of visually entrancing stuff that goes into slow arthouse movies. No wonder they’re so relaxing.
Being on social media had just gradually eroded all that for me, to the point of not really being present anymore in physical reality. I would get sucked into my phone vortex, trapped in a survival response of defensive orienting. This matched my hypervigilance: looking for a threat or something that would help me survive by endlessly scrolling through social media. ‘Maybe down below, there is something important for me to make ends meet this month’.
Now, I’m able to calmly and curiously orient to my offline surroundings.
I am able to let that soft animal do what it loves in the family of things, y’know?
If I feel I’ve had enough of the screen (I strive for every minute but it’s usually longer), I look up, breathing while I watch the wind blow through the tree branches outside the window, without feeling a pull to look at the screen again. (Or sometimes I have gotten trapped again which is shown by the amount of ‘itch’ I feel to get back online, so this is a good barometer).
I look at the house plants and sense whether they need watering or not, instead of forgetting about them until they have gotten crispy. If I see something messy in the room, I can follow my impulse to clean it up immediately, instead of forcing myself. I take small, mindful breaks. I immediately release tension that comes up after reading or watching something intense, instead of holding it in like pee. My eyesight has improved, which is a whole story of its own. Also, I actually pee when I need to pee and not scroll just a bit more.
These are seemingly small examples but they make a huge difference for the nervous system.
Orienting is also why I like to read about other people’s relationship to social media and the details of that (which is why I write this in excruciating detail, and if you have read this far, you’re probably the same).
It is helpful for me to visualize all this information (at least the 50% non-AI portion) on my screen as coming from actual, breathing human beings sitting on a couch somewhere, just like I am right now. Just to give you something to orient to: I am sitting here with my bare feet on my earthing mat and an orgonite pyramid nearby. I mean, even though I have admonished that whole glamour guru persona, I’m still spiritual.
Healing my addiction
As I probably won’t have to tell you, social media is much more socially accepted as an addiction than for example substance abuse, but it’s an addiction nonetheless. It is set up to be addictive. I personally look at this from a nervous system perspective.
Instagram, TikTok and other fast-paced social media platforms match with heightened fight/flight.
In other words, activation in the sympathetic nervous system, which is the branch that mobilizes us into action - nothing wrong with it, except for when this energy gets stuck due to trauma. If we get hooked on Instagram, this so-called ‘hyperarousal’ often already exists in our body and Instagram matches and exacerbates it. Combined with a trapped freeze response on top, it leads to a pattern of procrastination and doomscrolling.
After I restored regulation in my nervous system, most of the pace and structure of Instagram was just not connecting to my system anymore. It felt gross.
But that didn’t happen overnight.
Whenever we have an addiction we want to heal, I believe it is important to first bring awareness to what it is actually giving us. How do we feel better when we engage with it?
What I noticed: I would go on it mostly from a feeling of restless boredom, and I would get an outlet for that restless energy so it could somewhat be managed, but never fully released. This all indicated that there was life force energy stuck in my system - making me hypervigilant, looking for a way out - that was being held because of nervous system dysregulation that the platform knows exactly how to manipulate.
It’s not just me - it’s these platforms, too.
Questioning this, but also letting myself have it, consciously, as I went on the app, was stage 1 of healing this. Really feeling and taking in what it gave me.
Then, stage 2: working with all the trapped survival stress somatically, on a sensation level. I had to take it step by step, healing this. I returned to the process over time. The sensations and patterns around this were actually not unfamiliar. Instagram just exposed and amplified it.
But ultimately, it was not about Instagram at all. It was about my ability (or lack thereof) for stress regulation in general, and how this reflected a larger pattern of dysregulation.
Finally, sweet relief
I took it upon myself to learn how to restore regulation in my nervous system. What that actually means goes beyond the scope of this piece. Long story short, when I had done that, it removed the last ‘hook’ Instagram had for me. Now, it had no power over me anymore.
The thing with nervous system dysregulation is (especially when caused by early developmental trauma), we can only heal it slowly. We can’t force ourselves. That’s why I don’t necessarily believe that the decision to quit Instagram cold turkey is always the best idea. If it works for you to do a sudden digital detox that you can sustain, that is great. I needed a more gradual approach, to make it stick, and I think this might be true for more people.
In the past, when I quit Facebook and my first Instagram pages, after a while I just went back on social media in the same way, just disguised differently, because it still matched the hyperarousal in my system, plus I got some other things out of it that I couldn’t brainstorm better alternatives for. But I’ve finally found those alternatives now.
I don’t think I will ever get a new Instagram page to post things.
And then… Instagram strikes back
During the writing of this post (which took months as I processed the last remnants of this addiction), I got an email from Instagram that they had suspended my old account for some bogus reason (spam) even though I hadn’t been posting for over a year. This was my main public account, called rose.stickle and rose.stokkel at first, then mayasana.healing, the one with the 800+ followers that I made private and removed people from, until I only had 100.
At first I was taken aback by losing my account, because as I said, this page contained an archive that showed my growth over the past years (which apparently I could download, so I did that, and will probably never look at, plus I’ve always saved all my own photos anyway - turns out my sentimentality was more about the idea of it than actually wanting to hold on).
So, what do you think? Maybe the Instagram algorithm peeked in on me writing this anti-Instagram post and enacted its revenge - can it even do that?
Anyway, the timing was interesting.
After a short stint of being outraged at this soulless platform deleting my hard work, I realized that this was actually a synchronistic opportunity for me to fully release Instagram, to no longer hold onto any of this energy.
So, bye.
Instagram addiction chapter officially closed.
Some encouragement
If you relate and want to get off Instagram or similar fast-paced, enshittificated social media platforms: unless you are guided otherwise, I recommend a process of self-inquiry and healing over time, in small bits and pieces.
I recommend talking about it, writing about it, getting that awareness going. Here are some prompts for self-reflection, inspired by the book ‘Digital Minimalism’ by Cal Newport:
What do you actually do online? Which platforms do you use, what exactly do you do on these platforms and for how long? Prepare to be surprised - or even shocked! Use screen time measuring apps if needed. Included in this can be overt social media use (like Instagram or TikTok), but also more ‘hidden’ forms of social media. For me, this included: how I didn’t have a subscription but still used Spotify for podcasts, a bunch of Telegram/Signal groups with events in my area that I never went to, and the (Substack) newsletters I got in my inbox. I asked a lot of people what they actually did on their phones too, and it was very interesting and connective.
How does what you do online make you feel? Reflect on it for every platform or online habit separately. For example, Spotify podcasts made me feel the pressure that I always had to educate myself and listen to something while doing household tasks.
What is it giving you? Which need does it meet? Again, every platform (or even what you use it for/different functions on it) separately. Ex: Spotify fulfilled my need for education and stimulation.
Does this align with what you really think is important, your values? For example, does the habit of distraction and quick stimulation when bored, align with your deepest values on how you want to live your life? Like: did watching endless recipe shorts on YouTube shorts really help with my value to keep my cooking interesting? Uhm, no, I just needed 1 or 2. As for Spotify, education and mental stimulation are genuine values of mine.
Are there ways you can give yourself what you value that are more healthy? Is this social media platform really the best way to do that? Or can you find a way that has less negative impact? For example, if you want to get life updates from that cousin on Instagram, can you actually start calling them to (re)build a closer relationship, or ask to be added to a whatsapp group to get the cute baby photo’s directly? Another example: if you want recipes like me, you can maybe go for magazines or books from the library instead (I did this as well), or start exchanging recipes with someone - unless the videos give you the necessary visual learning and motivation to actually get up and cook. This is all highly individual. Your choice. You’re completely free to tailor it consciously. Switching from Spotify podcasts to seeking them out on YouTube gave me the opportunity to still educate myself, but without the pressure that I felt to always do it in a quiet moment - watching something feels different than only listening, I feel less like I can do it while also doing something else. I value doing one thing at at time, fully focused, not scatter my attention in multiple things at once. For a YouTube video, I will sit down. For Spotify, I did not. So it had to go. I deleted Spotify. I took a fine comb to all my media use and only kept what truly gave me energy: mostly just certain newsletters and ad-free YouTube videos.
Based on what you find, you can then either decide to quit a platform, or set up solid boundaries that structure how you interact with it. Some examples of structuring: only interact at certain times (like on the weekend), only interact on your laptop while deleting the apps from your phone which makes it harder to check them 80 times a day, when you want to keep using the phone apps also use apps that throw you off once you’ve reached a time limit, or strictly limit or regulate who you follow/what content you’re exposed to. I did all of this with Instagram and found what works for me. Only you can be the judge of whether these structures will actually work sustainably.
What healing from social media looks like
Not feeling the tempation to go onto a platform that previously had us hooked is amazing. Even when we do get the opportunity to go on again, finding that it doesn’t spark any of that old addiction can be a big milestone!
How you know that you’re really healing from the social media addiction, is when you go onto the platform and start feeling repelled or even disgusted by the negative aspects of it as you are completely sober - the way it would maybe feel to someone that has never seen the social medium before, and is introduced for the first time. Their system not being used to it at all, they will feel it is ‘too much’ (or whatever the negative aspect is) really fast, and feel a natural need to look away, maybe even scrunching up their nose and recoiling at all the chaos.
In my opinion, this disgust is a natural reaction to something that’s overly stimulating.
Maybe we can learn to get used to visual/auditory stimulation, but our nervous system can only go so far in adapting in a healthy way - it becomes unhealthy really soon, we get agitated first and then we shut down, locked into a pattern of scrolling. I believe that biologically, we’re just not wired for this, to take in so much information at once.
Maybe, like me, you’ll find that your social media usage is related to your capacity to regulate stress in general. If you suppress the natural reaction of disgust on a toxic platform, what else are you suppressing? If we take that power back, the ‘hooks’ that these fast-paced social media platforms have, their carefully curated addictive algorithms, don’t have a hold on us anymore. With nervous system regulation, we can be free in how we choose to engage.
Zooming out
I’m a millennial from ‘90, so I was right on the cusp of all this. I knew a time before social media, but I’m also fully marinated in it. I believe the high levels of anxiety that are widely reported in the generations after me, Gen Z and Gen Alpha, that are growing up in this digital age, are just mirroring back our society’s deeply dysregulated state.
It is easy to look at younger people with disdain, like a generation tends to do with the ones that came after them. But I think it is good to read stories, like this perspective of a Gen Z’er embracing the internet, or this perspective of young people feeling a longing for something they never had. Often these younger generations call out dysfunction that older generations were still able to deny. But this dysregulation just manifests differently for older generations. It’s the same pattern. It’s societal and generational trauma. I don’t believe that we are aware enough of stress regulation as a society to engage with social media on such a scale in a balanced way.
Our society may not always have had social media. But it always had nervous system dysregulation. It always had addiction. It always consisted of toxic, unaware and dysfunctional patterns. Social media just mirrors all that. It shines light on the shadow and exacerbates it, just like AI does. And we are in need of a huge wave of collective healing, to also heal our relationship to our planet - for that, we apparently need these mirrors.
For me, the solution is nervous system work. For others, the solution might be different. This digital age isn’t going anywhere even though the internet as we know it might be dead soon and become an uncanny valley of bots interacting with bots but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. However it will play out, I believe that artificial stimulation can never take the place of our biological needs. In my little algorithmic silo at least, I see many people rediscovering what makes us human and find a renewed value in offline hobbies. I value small online communities where depth and real connection are valued.
In order to truly peel away and not be tempted by the pitfalls of artificial platforms, we might need to learn about our biology and engage with our body in a healthy way. We don’t learn about stress regulation in school, we don’t learn how to feel internally what’s going on when we engage in something that is addictive, or how to get out of it. We also don’t learn to tap into our personal connection to the divine for guidance.
If nothing else, social media is doing a great job at helping us spread awareness about its toxicity, and I am grateful for platforms like Substack (or newsletters in general) that, to me, have a much better energy. May we discover more awareness in our relationship to online platforms and take back our agency and curate our usage of these spaces in a way that is healthy.
I’m curious about your reflections on social media. Feel free to share in the comments.
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