I deleted TikTok for a week. This is what I learnt.
I have a love-hate relationship with TikTok. I love the constant dopamine hit when I scroll through my FYP (For You Page), but I also hate how drained I get from the amount of brainrot on my feed.
I often use TikTok as an escape after a long day, but the more I scroll, the more exhausted I get. It’s a pretty toxic cycle – at my worst I was clocking nearly 35 hours of scrolling a week (that’s 5 hours a day!!). So in August, I decided to delete TikTok.
During that time, I had just finished 2 big back-to-back projects at work with no breaks, I was fighting jetlag, and had just watched 16 films (!!) at the Sydney Film Festival. I desperately needed time to reset and finish my large backlog of tasks, and knew if I still had my TikTok app on my phone I would waste my week off just doom scrolling in bed. Choosing to delete it for a week was an easy decision, but I didn’t realise how much it would teach me about myself.
TikTok was inadvertently taking away my free will, and I liked it
The minute my brain felt a microsecond of boredom, my thumb would swipe to my home page and click the space where my TikTok app was. I only noticed how bad it was during my break. I’d catch myself swiping to the empty space where the app used to be, pause, and then sit with my boredom for a whole minute because I genuinely did not know what to do with myself.
During this small period of time I’d have to grapple with my own free will – what was I supposed to do with the time now that I don’t have content and entertainment delivered on a silver platter for me? Even YouTube and Netflix require some level of thought – you have to choose how you spend your time and pick what you want to watch (and even thinking about doing that was exhausting enough). TikTok was easy, all you had to do was open the app and watch it if you liked it, or swipe if you didn’t.
It was genuinely uncomfortable realising that one of the reasons why I relied so heavily on TikTok was because it took up so much of my time, and I liked how my addiction was a way to escape the possibility of having free time and doing something meaningful with it. It’s scary to try something new, to challenge yourself – and I was using TikTok as an excuse to not give myself time to confront my bigger life goals.
TikTok is watching the same content over and over again until you die
If you’ve ever been on TikTok, you may have noticed that as soon as the algorithm knows you’re interested in something, it starts sending you the same types of videos within minutes and continues serving you the same content to keep you hooked.
Before deleting TikTok, when other people asked me why I couldn’t delete it, I’d say, “I want to know the trends that are happening, it’s relevant to my job” (which is technically not a lie). TikTok was where the latest trends lived, and I wanted to see it all happen in real time.
But even though I was watching 35 hours of TikTok a week, I wasn’t actually watching 35 hours of new content – I was watching 1 hour’s worth of “new content” 35 times. It was just the same type of content repackaged through different creators, all trying to go viral. Once I realised this, it was easier to step back and decrease the FOMO I felt, and I knew I didn’t have to spend that much time on the app to know what was happening in the zeitgeist.
Admittedly, there’s a part of me (the lazy part) that would still be happy to watch TikTok 35 hours a week because it’s easy and still beneficial to me in some way. It’s much easier to stick with what’s familiar and comfortable, rather than taking a risk on something new and difficult.
You can’t escape hyperbolic, black and white messaging on TikTok
Even before I started watching TikTok, I used to always think and talk in hyperbole. If I had a strong stance on something, I would push my argument as far as I could to make my point clear.
By definition hyperbole means “exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally” – and even though I spoke with vigour, there was a level of nuance I actively maintained to keep myself grounded.
Hearing that type of hyperbolic language non-stop on my FYP for 5 years didn’t feel unusual for me. But after taking my break, I realised that watching that type of content for thousands of hours (since 2020) really rewired my brain and point of view.
TikTok was designed that way – to retain attention for as long as possible. In order to get people’s attention, creators have to be bold, strong minded, and perhaps a little controversial. You only have a limited time to capture someone’s attention before they scroll, so the best thing to do is say something singular that is easy to understand. Therein lies the problem – advice and opinions on the app lack nuance, and if they are nuanced, that’s not what audiences take from it (see any TikTok comment section and you’ll understand).
I consider myself an emotionally intelligent person, and I understand that not everything is black and white – yet, it was so easy to adopt the mindset of the people I was watching. Messages in the vein of “If this person doesn’t treat you this way, then they don’t like you” flooded my FYP, everything was spoken in absolutes as if they were fact. Messages like, “If you do this, then you have ADHD and you’re a narcissist” became so normal for me to hear that I started thinking in extremes as well.
And it wasn’t just the opinions, it was the lifestyles I saw on my FYP – I’d see those perfect organisation and house tour videos and want my life to look like that too. There was a part of me that knew that perfect apartment was curated for filming, yet I still wanted my place to look like that. As much as I wanted to deny it, consuming that much content really did change the way I approached my life. I would start to think in absolute terms – If my home didn’t look like that I wasn’t capable; if this person didn’t treat me like this then I wasn’t a worthy human being.
Breaking away from this black and white thinking not only refreshed my mind, but also took away all the brain fog I had been experiencing for years.
The only way to learn in life is to live it
After having all these revelations, I realised the only way to really learn anything is not to have people tell you what to do, but to live your life as authentically as possible and own the mistakes you make. As a perfectionist, I was always scared of making mistakes so I would load up my brain with as much knowledge and “emotional armour” as I could before stepping out into the real world. Unconsciously or not, TikTok became the source for that armour.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that no matter how much advice you get, you don’t really truly learn something unless you do it and make the mistake – and if you rely on people to guide you through everything you’ll never gain the confidence in yourself to make decisions on your own. I knew that by spending so much time on TikTok I was slowly losing my own independent thought, I could hear myself echoing the messages from my FYP without considering whether or not I truly agreed with them or not.
How has my life improved?
I had those big epiphanies above, but how did my life improve in small ways?
I don’t think in extremes as much anymore, and I’m much kinder to myself
I have way less brain fog and started dreaming again (in the literal sense, I used to dream 5% of the time, and it increased to 90% when I stopped watching TikTok)
I sleep better
I felt a lot more boredom and unpleasant feelings, but it led to more creative outcomes and emotional growth
I’m more inspired when I consume media that has more thought and attention put into it (I started watching longform media like TV and shows, which made me want to be more creative)
I spent less money (who woulda thought!)
Am I back on TikTok?
Yes! But I definitely spend less time on it than before, and set my timer to 1 hour a day (which I often split equally in the morning and evenings). I spend the hours I’ve gained reading, drawing, journaling, and watching longform media which I find way more valuable.
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