A 30-day exit from the feed
Then let's take it apart deliberately. A structured plan that works on the mechanics of the habit rather than asking you to want it less.
I spend about hours a day in the feed.
Average daily time in social feeds, per user, worldwide.
DataReportal / GWI, 2025–26
The threshold TikTok's own research set for a lasting habit — reachable in under 35 minutes.
Kentucky AG filing, via NPR, 2024
Attorneys general in federal court against Meta over addictive design. Opening statements: this month.
Oakland, California, August 2026
Court filings, internal research, and peer-reviewed trials. Every claim below links to its source. Nothing here is our opinion.
Leaked internal slides showed Meta had spent years researching Instagram's effect on teenagers. One 2019 slide, as reported: "We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls." The research was not public until it leaked.
Meta's response is worth reading too — it argued the reporting cherry-picked findings, and published annotated versions of the decks in reply. Read both and judge.
Coverage Meta's replyRedactions failed in a Kentucky court filing, exposing TikTok's internal research. The company had identified the point a viewing habit locks in: 260 videos. Because clips run a few seconds, state investigators calculated that lands in under 35 minutes of use.
The same documents indicate the app's screen-time reminder was not expected to meaningfully cut usage; internally it was framed around "improving public trust."
NPR investigationSean Parker, Facebook's founding president, told an Axios audience the design question was how to consume as much of your time and attention as possible — and that the like-and-comment loop was there to deliver small hits of validation. He described the approach as "exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology," and said the founders understood it and proceeded anyway.
Whatever you make of the man, this is a design description, not a critic's theory.
Axios interviewThe advisory's central finding is a negative one: on the available evidence, we "cannot conclude social media is sufficiently safe" for children and adolescents. It cites a cohort study of 12-to-15-year-olds in which more than three hours a day was associated with double the risk of poor mental health outcomes.
In 2024 the Surgeon General went further and called for a tobacco-style warning label, which would require an act of Congress.
Read the advisoryA coalition of state attorneys general is in trial against Meta over claims its platforms were engineered to keep young users hooked, and that the public was misled about safety. The case follows a 2023 suit joined by 33 states, and a New Mexico judgment holding the company liable as a public nuisance.
Days before trial, an appeals ruling let thousands of related addiction suits proceed — platform immunity did not cover failure-to-warn claims.
Ruling coverage Trial openingEconomists paid 2,743 people to deactivate Facebook for four weeks. Compared with the control group, they reported higher subjective well-being, spent more time offline with family and friends, and knew less about the news cycle. After the study ended, their usage stayed lower.
A larger 2024 replication covering roughly 35,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts found the same direction of effect, somewhat smaller.
The studyAveraged across whole populations, the measured effect of screen time on well-being is small — Orben and Przybylski's widely cited 2019 analysis found digital use explains a fraction of a percent of the variation between people. One 2022 randomised trial that capped students at ten minutes a day found no significant change in well-being or grades; participants moved the time into messaging apps instead.
Two things can be true. The average effect across everyone is modest, and heavy use is a different situation from average use. The design mechanics documented above are not in dispute — companies wrote them down themselves. If your own use is closer to five hours than to twenty minutes, the population average is not your number.
Evidence in this guide is drawn from
Cited, not affiliated. No organisation listed here endorses this program.
[Two sentences from a real participant about what changed in the first week. Keep it specific — a habit, a time of day, a number.]
[A quote that names the hardest part and how the plan handled it. Specific beats glowing.]
[A quote about what happened after day 30 — what they kept, what they let back in.]
Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, and nothing is stored after you close the tab.
This is a self-reflection prompt, not a clinical assessment or a diagnosis of anything.
Miss a day and you have not failed. Fill the next one.
Each week removes one layer of the loop: the trigger, then the access, then the boredom, then the return.
Notifications off, badges off, greyscale on, apps off the home screen. You are not quitting yet. You are removing the parts that decide for you.
Log out after each use. Browser only, no apps. A rule for where and when. Every second of delay is a second your judgement gets to work.
The hard week. Boredom arrives on schedule around day fifteen. You need something waiting for it — one activity, decided in advance, that starts within reach of your chair.
Now choose from a clear head: what comes back, on which device, in which window. Written down. Most people keep one app and set a time.
Free · No account · 30 days
The full guide, the daily prompts, and the printable tracker. One email at the start of each week, then it stops.
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