Beating online addiction is harder than ever — but not all hope is lost
It is late at night after a long day of work and you are ready for a well-deserved night of sleep. But here you are, still awake, scrolling on your phone, wasting precious minutes to hours of sleep. Sound familiar? If so, it might be time for a digital detox.
While social media addiction is not officially recognised as a mental health disorder, governments and non-profits like the Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous (ITAA) are trying to help those struggling to stay offline.
In March, a landmark trial found Meta and Google responsible for creating addictive social media platforms. A few months earlier in January, Australia officially banned social media for under-16s, and the UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to do the same.
“We just had this huge societal change, it’s almost snuck up on us,” says Hector Hughes, co-founder of Unplugged, a company offering digital detox cabins, where visitors lock up their phones for a few days to stay offline. Twenty years ago, only 11 per cent of the adults in the US used social media, compared to 73 per cent in 2025. In the UK, almost 80 per cent of the population uses social media regularly.
“I could go 10 to 15 hours non-stop on the internet,” says Max, whose name has been changed to protect his anonymity. Max has been taking part in the ITAA for almost two years. “I’ve been addicted to the internet for a few years, but it got worse in lockdowns,” he says.
Max, who is in his fifties, lives on his own, works part-time and has been single for a while. As loneliness crept in, YouTube videos took over that space.
For Max, there is an important difference between spending too much time online and being addicted. Addiction, he believes, is when “your life has become unmanageable because of your addiction”.
Social media and internet addiction is also particularly difficult to fight as most of our communications and services are now almost only accessible online. “The only social media I have is LinkedIn,” Hughes, co-founder of Unplugged, explains. “I do try not to spend too much time on it, but it’s tricky, I definitely haven’t got the balance right.” For him, finding this balance is the key to a healthy relationship with social media.
To keep a healthy balance between the online and real world, Hughes recommends doing regular “unplugged days”. He does a couple of retreats a year, though that can come at a high price: it costs at least £500 for three nights in an Unplugged cabin. Other digital detoxes are available: last month, Hughes did the Camino, an 11-day pilgrimage in Spain, completely offline.
For Max, social media addiction can be compared to overeating. “It’s not quite the same, but hardly anyone can live without the internet and almost no one can live without technology,” he explains. “You’d have to live in a cave in the hills eating nuts and berries.”
He still uses social media for his work or to communicate with his friends and family, especially with his son, on WhatsApp – but he says that joining the ITAA has otherwise helped greatly.
He found support and met one of his closest friends, who could understand his struggle. “That’s just made my life better,” he says.
The ITAA also gave him tools to understand his addiction better and fight it, including the concept of the top and bottom lines. The bottom lines are the things he finds compulsive, such as scrolling on social media, while the top lines are the behaviours that keep him off the bottom line. For Max, that is writing and other creative activities, which he finds much more rewarding than consuming internet content.
Whether building habits or trying new hobbies, it is always good to take a step back from social media and rethink our relationship with it – safe in the knowledge that there’s always support and a community to be found away from our screens.
Featured Image Credit: Emilie Lenglart
