PARKER, Colo. — The night before Addisyn Mace started the detox, she tucked herself into a bedroom nook and allowed herself one last binge. She was 14, a month into her freshman year of high school, the kind of kid who went to church every Sunday and never failed a test, but she wasn’t thinking about God or school as she unlocked her phone.
She opened Instagram. Online, a woman curled her hair. Boys yelled. Boys played basketball. A dachshund ate a cucumber. A man in a car ate takeout. A woman in a car shared her opinions.
Addisyn lingered on each video for three seconds or less. She thumbed past a makeup tutorial and a trailer for the movie version of her favorite book. She ignored the sweet calico begging at her feet as she zipped by one cat video then another. In the kitchen, her great-grandmother was baking cinnamon rolls, and, online, Addisyn watched a stranger create the same treat.
She had begged for the right to watch these clips. She had asked when she was 12, then again for her 13th birthday, to download Instagram so she could see what other girls saw as they stared at their phones during hangouts. Addisyn’s mother, Shera, had used social media for nearly two decades, but she’d grown increasingly skeptical of the apps’ influence. She made Addisyn wait until she turned 14 to join.
Addisyn knew why her mother thought social media was bad for her. Every school lecture on bullying warned kids to stay off Snapchat. And just a few weeks earlier, Addisyn had read that Meta agreed to pay Colorado and other states and territories $18 billion after a coalition of attorneys general sued the social networking company for damage they said Instagram and Facebook have done to young people.
Addisyn had been on for just five months, but already she could feel that Instagram had reshaped her days and, most likely, her brain. She used to come home from school and read or practice guitar. Now, she watched other people strum online. She scrolled past her favorite country singer, Morgan Wallen, as he sang the opening lines of “I Got Better,” then she DM’d her mother a cartoon cat meme.
Shera was 15 feet away, curled up with her own phone in the living room, half-watching a Broncos game, half-staring at the inspirational stories that made up her Instagram feed. She had tried to limit how much time her children spent on the internet, but she was an exhausted single mother who worked full-time. Most evenings, she felt like Instagram was all she had.
“Mom,” Addisyn called from her nook. “You didn’t respond to that meme I sent you.”
Shera wandered back to her daughter’s bedroom and found her sitting in a fuzzy pink chair in a room lit only by a makeup vanity. Addisyn had decorated the room with analog entertainment. She had a shelf full of young adult novels and a crate stuffed with records she played on a turntable, but she didn’t engage with them as often as she had before.
“I saw it,” Shera said.
“But you didn’t respond,” Addisyn said. “How do I know you saw it if you don’t respond?”
They had only an hour or two left before they gave up the devices that both entranced and isolated them. A nonprofit had challenged students at Addisyn’s school to quit social media for a month, and Addisyn had agreed — partly because she wanted to be a good student, partly because she knew that she was already addicted to the tiny videos she barely watched and couldn’t remember.
Shera had decided she’d do the detox, too, but as the start of it drew near, they both felt more than a little worried.
“It’s literally how I relax,” Shera said as she looked back at her phone.
“I know,” Addisyn said. “It’s kind of all I want to do.”
THE NEXT MORNING, the assistant principal at Venture Academy of Leadership and Entrepreneurship (VALE) called Addisyn and the other freshmen to a special lecture. It was 8 a.m., early enough that more than half wandered in looking like they’d rather be in bed. Several wore blankets around their shoulders. Without a word, they deposited their phones into pouches on a wall.
Like many schools across the United States, VALE had tried to find ways to break its students’ attachment to their phones. More than half of U.S. states now ban phones “bell-to-bell,” while Colorado and others allow districts to create their own rules.
Last year, VALE partnered with the nonprofit NoSo Connection Collective to lead its entire student body through a month-long detox from social media. The nonprofit was created by a Colorado teenager in the years after she lost 10 classmates to suicide. Maddie Freeman couldn’t say that social media was the only reason her peers had struggled, but she knew her own mental health had tanked soon after she turned 12 and downloaded Snapchat. Within a few months, she was competing in online “thigh gap” weight loss challenges, and she was sneaking out of class to message Justin Bieber. By the time she reached high school, she was spending every waking hour on the platforms.
The average teen spends at least four hours a day on social media sites, and nearly half of U.S. teens say they are on “almost constantly.” That level of participation can have devastating effects on young people’s mental health and attention span, public health experts say. Multiple studies have found that heavy users are twice as likely to be depressed as nonusers. Other researchers have found that social media can be particularly harmful to girls’ self-esteem and self-image.
And so VALE had brought Freeman’s nonprofit back to try to reach Addisyn and her classmates before their burgeoning interest in social media turned dire. To do that, it had to persuade the kids to do exactly what social media was telling them not to: quit. That impossible sales pitch fell to a bouncy University of Colorado at Boulder student named Ben Forman. He’d had the apps since he was 11, he told the group, and he once thought he had “the world in my hands.”
“It was the most powerful 4-by-6 screen I could have ever imagined,” he said. “And I fell in love.”
Forman showed a few silly TikTok videos he had made when he was young, then he got down to business. He asked Addisyn and her classmates how Instagram earned $84 billion in revenue but gave away its service. The class said “ads” in unison. Right, Forman said. Companies pay to place the ads.
“Then what is Instagram selling? What is the product?” he asked.
The teenagers shifted uncomfortably on their stools. No one posited a guess.
“We’re the product,” Forman said. “We are what is being sold.”
A few students pulled their blankets tighter around their shoulders, and Forman explained that to earn money, Instagram had to keep people like them online for as long as possible. The company had found lots of new ways to do that since it launched in 2010, Forman said. It had added stories and push notifications and something called “infinite scroll.”
If Addisyn had logged on a decade earlier, she might have had a more limited relationship with Instagram. She follows just 35 people. In the days before infinite scroll, she would have seen the posts those 35 people made, and then she would have reached the end of her feed. Most likely, she would have logged off after a few minutes. But friends are no longer the point, Forman explained. Today, teenagers spend more time watching content produced by strangers on a stream that never ends.
Meta executives have described these new features as “useful,” but Forman told the class that court documents revealed something more sinister at work. As young people abandoned Facebook, the company’s top leaders began talking about what they described as the “teen problem” that had lost them roughly $12 billion. In a 2018 internal email, company leaders assigned a dollar amount to Addisyn and her classmates:
“The lifetime value of a 13 y/o teen is roughly $270.”
Meta figured it would lose more than a billion dollars a year by 2030 if it didn’t keep teenagers online. Court documents show that Meta employees knew years ago that teenagers struggled to sign off the apps. In 2020, one senior researcher called the app “a drug” that dulls people’s ability to feel rewards. That same year, a marketing employee for the company told a co-worker that teens “feel addicted to IG.” “Like addicts,” she wrote, “they feel that they are unable to stop themselves from being on IG.”
Addisyn knew what they meant. Sometimes, in the middle of reading a book she loved, she’d reach for her phone even if she didn’t really want to scroll. It felt compulsive, beyond a 14-year-old’s power to control.
Forman talked for a while about algorithms and the ways the companies track even the actions users don’t make. Then he invited the students to give up social media for a month.
Most seemed loath to do it. A few agreed to cut down the number of hours they spent on YouTube, but only two said they would do the full detox: Addisyn and a Snapchat-obsessee named Scarlett Sable. Scarlett figured she spent close to four hours every school day messaging friends and posting TikTok dance videos. On the weekends, she almost never logged off.
When Forman finished, the students collected their phones. Some sneaked glances at their notifications. Others opened the apps they had just learned might harm them. Addisyn stepped outside and deleted Instagram without word or fanfare. Scarlett hesitated, then told the assistant principal she needed someone to hold her hand. She squealed as her thumb hovered over the yellow Snapchat icon.
“I did the hardest one first, you guys,” Scarlett said. “I’m shaking!”
The class cheered as she deleted TikTok. A bell rang, then both girls stared in disbelief at their suddenly boring phones.
ADDISYN FELT CONFLICTED the rest of the day. She couldn’t believe someone had designed a product to lure teens into addiction. And yet she couldn’t stop thinking about all the things she’d miss without Instagram. The homecoming dance was coming up. How would she see all the photos girls posted? How would she let them know she thought they looked great?
A few hours into the detox, she checked her phone. Scarlett had texted.
“Girl, I’m dying. I hate this. I just want Snap back like literally so bad,” she wrote.
“That’s how I feel about Insta,” Addisyn wrote back. “What am I going to do?”
That night, as Shera made hamburgers on a George Foreman grill, she and Addisyn talked about how their first few hours had gone. Addisyn’s younger brother, Bentley, had decided to give up Roblox and YouTube for the month, but he had barely noticed their absence that day. The only family member who didn’t want to detox was Addisyn’s 91-year-old great-grandmother, Laverne Bila.
“I’m not giving up YouTube,” Laverne said. “Nooo. That’s my entertainment at night. They have some cute Western stories. And there’s a Canadian fellow I like who makes wreaths.”
The hamburgers sizzled, and Addisyn leaned against the counter.
“I just can’t stop thinking about the fact that I just don’t have it anymore,” she told her mother.
“My lunch break was the worst,” Shera said.
Shera works at a preschool, and, usually, she scrolled while the children napped. That day, she had reached for her phone over and over again and finally decided she could at least browse Amazon.
“I literally was shopping, so it’s going to cost me money,” she said. Once the hamburgers were ready, they sat at the dinner table and talked about Dolly Parton, which led them to Miley Cyrus.
“Her father was quite an entertainer at one time,” Laverne said.
“She just dropped his last name,” Shera said. “I’m not going to know any of this anymore. The only things I know are from Instagram.”
After dinner, they decamped to the living room and set up a bedazzle kit Shera had been meaning to finish for two years. They used pens to apply tiny gems to a picture of a snowman. Addisyn sighed.
“I would rather be on Instagram right now,” she said.
“I would rather be on Instagram right now,” Shera said.
They seemed relieved when it grew too late to work on the snowman. Still, Shera tried to stay positive. They had nothing to show for the hours they spent on Instagram. The bedazzling project was tangible, something they could hold onto.
“One day, we’ll finish,” Shera said, “and I’ll frame this.”
ON DAY THREE OF THE FAST, Scarlett texted Addisyn: “Bro, I gave up.”
Most of Scarlett’s friends from middle school attended a different high school, and the only way they kept up with each other was through Snapchat. She felt lonely and disconnected, she told Addisyn, and she couldn’t imagine spending an entire month that way.
Addisyn wasn’t lonely, exactly, but her thumb did keep reaching for the spot on her phone where Instagram used to be. She watched a lot of TV the first weekend. But soon, she felt her creative juice return. She wrote three songs and learned how to cook crepes. She read whole book chapters without looking at her phone. Her average daily screen time plummeted by hours, and by the end of the second week, she felt lighter than she had in months.
No one touched the bedazzle project again, but they found other things they liked doing together. They tried out pickleball and dusted off the board games they had let sit in the closet. They played mini games of baseball as Bentley worked on his pitching.
Still, Addisyn missed Instagram and counted down the days she had left. Taylor Swift released a new song, and Addisyn missed the initial release because the singer put it on Instagram. She made it through homecoming without giving up, but she felt left out as other girls recorded videos as they got ready at Addisyn’s house. The next morning, all she wanted to do was share the photos her mom had taken under a gazebo in the park.
Still, she didn’t cave. In fact, as the month wound down, she applied to be an ambassador for NoSo, the nonprofit that suggested the detox.
The night before Addisyn’s last day without social media, NoSo hosted a Zoom meeting for its young participants, and she learned that if she was going to serve as an ambassador, she needed to participate in the nonprofit’s marquee event — “No Social Media November.”
She knew she could go a month without Instagram, so she agreed, but the night before the detox ended, she realized she had a new dilemma. November was still two weeks away. She could use Instagram during that break, or she could just push through and do an extra-long detox.
That night, the family sat down to a dinner of white chicken chili, and Shera told her kids she was done with social media. She had more energy in the evenings, and she’d even replaced her nap time scrolling with schoolwork. She was halfway through earning her bachelor’s degree, but most of her classes were self-paced, and she’d often chosen to scroll instead of study. In just three weeks, though, she had made real progress on her marketing and conflict resolution classes.
Addisyn looked down at her food.
“I can’t decide what I want to do,” she said. “I feel like I’m going to miss out on something. I do feel better without social media, like I felt more productive, but also it never crossed my mind to stop having it.”
“I don’t think you should go back on tomorrow,” Shera said.
“I don’t know,” Addisyn said. “We’ll see. I want it back so badly.”
“What is it that you miss?” Shera asked.
“I don’t actually even know,” Addisyn said. “I just want it back.”
THE NEXT MORNING, Addisyn climbed out of her lofted bed and padded into the kitchen. She picked up her phone and considered her options: Instagram or no Instagram?
She put her phone down. First, she’d make muffins, then she’d decide.
By the time she pulled the muffins out of the oven, everyone else was awake. Her mom suggested they window shop along Main Street, so Addisyn put off her decision again.
Downtown, each family member picked out a treat. They found a picnic table in a park, then Addisyn pulled out her phone. She opened the app store, searched for Instagram, and her thumb hovered over the install button.
“I could download it right now and I could see everything that I missed,” she said. “I start thinking of all the notifications I’m going to have, and it’s like, ‘Oh, I could be in total bliss right now.’”
Shera put down her ice cream.
“Tell me one way getting back on social media will enrich your life,” she said. “Did you know Steve Jobs wouldn’t let his kids have an iPad? And Zuckerberg doesn’t let his kids have any social media. They see the fault in it, but they want you to do it.”
“You’re acting like I’m going to rob a bank or something,” Addisyn said.
A whole minute went by. Addisyn’s thumb trembled over the “install” button, then she sighed.
“Let’s go shop,” she said.
They walked down the street and stepped inside local spots hawking candles and handmade ghost art for Halloween. They tried to visit a studio that hosts open mic nights, but it was closed.
They drove to a park with a baseball field, and Bentley and Shera headed to the diamond. Addisyn wheeled her grandma to a spot in the dugout where she could watch, then she sat on a bench and pulled out her phone. Her fingers moved quickly over the screen. Shera asked Addisyn what she was doing.
“I’m looking up open mic nights,” she said.
Going off social media didn’t mean Addisyn or her mother had given up screens. Shera had worked her way up to level 737 on the cellphone game Jewels Legend. Addisyn still Googled things she wondered about. But she wasn’t scrolling. She was looking for opportunities to play music, so Shera left her to it.
After half an hour of searching, Addisyn put down her phone and picked up a bat. She didn’t consider herself athletic, but the more she swung, the more fun she had.
That evening, she made up her mind. She wouldn’t go back on Instagram — at least until the end of November. She stashed her phone in her back pocket and asked her mom and brother if they wanted to try a board game.
The post A 14-year-old quit Instagram for a month and discovered something surprising appeared first on Washington Post.
