Have you ever looked up from your phone, eyes stinging and mind cloudy, realising that hours have passed without your noticing? If this sounds like you, some people on the internet would have a prescription for you: you need to go touch grass.
To be told to touch grass is intended as an insult for people who spend too much time online, disconnected from the reality outside their pixelated screens. Touching grass means stepping away from the infinite scroll of our phones and spending time outside in nature and, well, real life.
Consumers in the UK spend an average of six hours of social media screen time, with people in the U.S. spending around seven hours on their phones. These rates rise with younger consumers. With the news that Elon Musk has officially (for real, this time) acquired Twitter, many people are announcing they're leaving Twitter in protest. As Mashable tech reporter Cecily Mauran argues, "for months, the social media platform has been awash with tweets making this smug threat. As a Person Who Uses the Internet, I'm begging you, please stop. No one cares."
Though touching grass is an internet joke, is it time for us to silently step away and touch grass? Can we take more from the advice to log off? And is it really possible to truly ‘touch grass’?
Time to log off, folks
Paulie, a teacher living in Manchester, initially started going on the internet as a teenager because his friends were on it – connecting with them on old-school networks like Bebo, founded in 2005. Then, as he got older, he started to become fixated by consuming content. He pinpoints that where things started to go wrong were with Twitter. "I was trying to keep up with politics and the news cycle… It made me feel awful watching the news and not being able to stop any of these terrible things from happening. I’d feel doomed." He knew he needed to take a break, so he stopped using social media for two months – he decided to experiment with touching grass.
"In any spare moment, like smoking a cigarette, I noticed I’d take my phone out and just passively stuff would flash past me… It was a way to fill spare time."
Mimi, a communications officer in London, felt she had to detox from social media for other reasons. She deactivated her Instagram account for almost two years, and now remains in a rapid cycle of de- and reactivating it. The main issue she encountered with social media was her passive, addictive use of it. "In any spare moment, like smoking a cigarette, I noticed I’d take my phone out and just passively stuff would flash past me… It was a way to fill spare time, and I realised I didn't need to and that it might be better to have a real rest for five minutes and possibly risk thinking one independent thought." She also began to realise that being online was leaving her in a constant state of dissatisfaction with her life: "These platforms exist to make you more miserable by making you aware of the things you don’t have. You’re perpetually in a state of consumption because you’re just a post away from seeing something and wanting it."
Tom, a data scientist in Manchester, felt Mimi’s mindless scrolling problem spiral out of control with his own internet use. "I get hyperfocused [so it would] often happen that I’d go on YouTube to watch one video and then four or five hours would go by without me realising and I’d sort of come out of this daze." He felt like he’d "wasted all this time and my brain felt really overloaded from all the content." Becoming sick of this pattern and the impact it was having on both his work and his personal life, Tom decided to stop all recreational internet use for a month and a half.
Each of these relationships with social media isn’t surprising to Juulia Karlstedt, a counsellor specialising in anxiety. "There is a growing body of research linking social media use to mental health difficulties like anxiety, depression, poor sleep, self-harm, and loneliness. Because social media is designed to grab our attention and hold it, there are a lot of inbuilt mechanisms in platforms that increase our consumption and, by extension, increase the risks to our mental health associated with high levels of use." With her own clients, she sees this problem particularly arise in people in their teens and 20s.
Karlstedt recommends that if people are feeling the detrimental effects of digital addiction, they should try taking a break. "Take stock of your life outside the platforms and see if there are areas that are meaningful to you that you could engage with offline. Social media's pull on us will always be greater when we don't have a strong anchor grounding us in our life offline."
Life is more enjoyable offline
That’s exactly what Paulie, Mimi, and Tom each tried to do. They all look back fondly on their time away from social media. Though they took different approaches, with Tom taking the most radical approach of avoiding anything he felt gave him a "release of dopamine," Paulie taking time away from Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to quit his doomscrolling and Mimi deleting Instagram to try and win some of her spare time back, they each told me they felt significant benefits from detoxing digitally.
Tom felt an immediate positive effect. "I felt really present and mindful, which I'd never really been before. I had a lot of free time, so I was very productive…I found myself being more present with people… Little things became so much more enjoyable because I wasn't getting the constant onslaught of stimulation and pleasure from digital stuff." Mimi felt her self-esteem improve as she wasn’t constantly comparing herself to people on Instagram stories.
"I had this idea that I’d put the phone down and then I’d be running out the door skipping like it’s spring and I would play the flute and sit under trees reading all day. It wasn’t like that really."
Paulie was a little bit underwhelmed initially. "I think before I gave it up I had this idea that I’d put the phone down and then I’d be running out the door skipping like it’s spring and I would play the flute and sit under trees reading all day. It wasn’t like that really. I was still on edge for the first few weeks just like I had been." However, over the following weeks, he started to see the benefits. "I definitely became more present, I wasn’t constantly taking in content every moment. I was also bored at times but that made me more present as it made me more interested in people in real life and what they had to say. My social anxiety improved, my real relationships improved with people I care about."
In logging off from the online world, Paulie, Tom and Mimi all felt both more and less connected to the ‘real’ world. They each felt more present in their ‘real’ lives, connecting with people on a deeper level. Going offline though, came with some disconnection from real world events. Paulie admits that "I used to talk about serious issues a lot. Then after my detox I was much less serious but to a point where I would not want to hear bad news at all." He’s trying to find a workable solution to this. "I'm trying to find the balance where I’m not constantly feeling awful about the world but where I'm also looped in and happy to talk about serious things and things that are real problems."
"Social media is very good at pulling us into mental tangents, so working with a timer can be helpful to check in with yourself if you've gone down a rabbit hole."
Karlstedt sees that this approach of balance and mindfulness will work well for those who want to stay engaged, or for those who have to use social media for purposes of work. "Social media is very good at pulling us into mental tangents, so working with a timer can be helpful to check in with yourself if you've gone down a rabbit hole. When the timer goes off, ask yourself what you were just consuming online and how you felt while consuming it. If you need to, take a moment to step away from social media and spend a little time off your device. When you're ready, engage mindfully again by setting a focus for yourself and set another time to check in again later."
While each of the detoxers spoke at length about the benefits they felt about detoxing digitally, they each ultimately ended up going back to social media. In the cases of Tom and Mimi, they went into somewhat of a relapse. Incidentally, they were both unwell at their time of this ‘relapse’ – unoccupied in bed, they each reengaged with their renounced apps. Tom, particularly, found himself spiralling. "I ended up pretty much overdosing on YouTube and then I was out of balance and had a really hard time trying to rein it back in again." He ultimately did though, finding his average screen time has decreased by about two hours a day.
They all suggested that they felt they ‘had’ to go back on it in the modern age but they all admitted that they often feel awful when they fall back into their old patterns. "It definitely has a detrimental effect on my life." Mimi acknowledged, mirroring similar thoughts to Paulie and Tom.
However, they’ve all also found balance.Taking a detox allowed each of them space to step back and reassess their addictive, autopilot relationship with social media. Both Tom and Mimi say they’d love to detox again, and hope to at some point soon. Paulie, however, argued that cold turkey wasn’t the way forward for him. "Being addicted to social media didn’t make me happy, but I needed to find balance. Plenty of good things have come from social media for me, so I’d never want to shut it off entirely."
While everyone I spoke to did ultimately return to their online life, it’s obvious that their attempt to ‘touch grass’ successfully showed them that digitally detoxing, even for a short while, had beneficial effects on their mental health. So maybe it’s time to try a period of touching grass – right after finishing this article, which you probably found through Twitter.
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