By the end of December 2025, I felt locked into “streaks” on several social media apps. My language-learning app cheered me on to a five-year streak. Reddit gave me a “badge” for consistently liking posts or making comments. And a puzzles app urged me to share my ongoing “achievements” with friends. It was a bit exhausting.
For the start of the year, I felt compelled to break all my streaks. But first, I had to break my social media habits.
Scientists have been studying social media usage and habits for decades, and there’s good news for others looking to shatter their streaks. Researchers studying habit behavior are finding that social media habits form easily, which means they can also be easily broken.
Read More: Boredom Has Its Benefits — But Can It Really Fix Your Attention Span?
Forming Daily Social Media Habits
Researchers writing in Personality and Individual Differences typically define social media as any platform where you can build a shareable profile. There are the usual suspects like Facebook or Instagram. But any app, like a language learning app, that allows you to build a profile and connect with others also qualifies.
Although most academic research on social media focuses on adolescents or young adults, scientists do have a sense of how much social media adults consume. A 2025 study by the Pew Research Center found that most U.S. adults use social media. Eighty-four percent of respondents said they used YouTube, and 71 percent liked Facebook. About half were on Instagram, and 37 percent used TikTok.
Most users use social media daily. Fifty-two percent went on Facebook daily, and 37 percent said they logged in several times a day. Almost half visited YouTube daily, and almost one-quarter went on TikTok.
How to Break a Social Media Habit
What prompts so many people to pick up their phone and scroll? Social media habits are learned behaviors in which people are initially rewarded for their use, according to a 2022 study in Current Opinion in Psychology. Apps might reward with badges, streaks, or affirmations. Or people might feel rewarded from interactions with other users, such as ‘likes’ or comments.
Using an app to check for ‘likes’ or maintain a streak becomes a repetitive behavior that turns habitual as the person begins to associate the app with specific cues. These cues might be internal — like feeling bored — or come from external cues like a notification about a recent post. Cues can also be performance-based. If a person, for example, always checks Facebook in the breakroom, they may reach for their phone without thinking.
“Habits can be good, they can be bad, they can be neutral,” says Joseph Bayer, an associate professor in the School of Communication at the Ohio State University who specializes in the psychology of communication technology.
Habits conserve cognitive energy. The brain, for example, doesn’t need to think through every step of carrying out the recycling bin.
“We need habits,” Bayer says, “We need ways to do things more efficiently; we can’t think of every micro step.”
But tuning out during repetitive movements can also be how some people find themselves phone in hand and deep into a doom scroll. In such situations, social media might feel addictive, but if usage isn’t negatively impacting the person’s finances, relationships, or overall well-being, then it should be considered a habit and not an addiction, Bayer says.
Habits, unlike addictions, are far easier to break. “You pick them up faster, but if you go a few days without it, you can extinguish them faster,” Bayer says.
Snuffing Out Social Media
People interested in breaking a social media habit should start by analyzing their usage.
“Ask, am I finding myself in it without meaning to find myself in it? Do you think you do it out of habit? And what makes you think it’s a habit?” Bayer says.
People can also try to understand their own habit pathways and find ways to limit use by throwing up roadblocks.
If a person walks into the breakroom at work, for example, and immediately starts scrolling Facebook, they can try leaving their phone in their bag or even removing the app. Or if a person always looks at Reddit in bed, they can move their phone from the nightstand to the dresser across the room.
“Removing the cue is generally the strategy for removing the habit,” Bayer says.
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from a study published in Personality and Individual Differences: United States adults’ social media use and digital emotion regulation in everyday life: The potential of social media to be harnessed for mental health
- This article references information from a study published in Pew Research Center: Americans’ Social Media Use 2025
- This article references information from a study published in Current Opinion in Psychology: Building and breaking social media habits
