Thirty-five studies show that cutting social media to an hour a day drops anxiety and depression within one to three weeks. Your brain's dopamine circuits recover after a few days of withdrawal, letting you feel better and enjoy other things again.
There is a body of experiments. They're called social media reduction experiments. A lot of researchers have said, we're going to randomly assign people, you know, 200 people reduce their social media use to an hour a day, 200 no change, and we see what happens. Um, so we've collected— we found, uh, I think about 35 of them by now. And almost all of them, if you focus— those that go on for at least a week, Ideally 2 or 3, and that focus on mental health, on anxiety and depression, almost all of them find that the levels of those things go down if you're off for a week or 2. That's how quickly this can turn around? That's right. Because think about dopamine. Your dopamine circuits, they'll recover if you stop the stimulation, and if you start thinking, you start doing other things. If you're addicted to something and you stop doing it, for the first few days it actually can be painful. But if you stick with it, within a week or two, your life comes back.
Oprah Winfrey: How to Find Your Unique Purpose, Authentic Power, and Calling in Life
