There’s a particular kind of scroll that happens during assessment season. You don't mean to open Instagram. You just find yourself there, watching someone's sunrise study session, captioned with something about discipline, while you sit in yesterday's clothes at 1am, wondering what's wrong with you.
I'm Lily, a postgraduate student studying Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory at King's. I've lost more than one revision hour to a procrastination spiral that started as "just five minutes" and ended somewhere deep in other people's lives. It turns out that the pull is not a personal failing, and there are better ways to handle it than white-knuckling through or deleting everything in a fit of frustration.
One of them is a digital sabbatical, a deliberate, time-limited break from social media that you choose on your own terms, rather than one you guilt yourself into and abandon two days later.
The pressure has a specific shape
During assessment periods, social media becomes particularly challenging. There are the productivity posts — colour-coded timetables, suspiciously aesthetic notes, people who appear to have already read everything — that make your own efforts feel inadequate by comparison. There are job offer announcements and internship acceptances that arrive right when you're already stretched thin and uncertain about your own future. There’s the procrastination spiral where you open an app for five minutes and lose forty-five. And there's the quieter exhaustion of feeling like you still need to maintain a presence online, to post, respond and stay visible.
What helped me most was understanding that this is not random. Dr Zeena Feldman, Reader in Digital Culture at King's and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Culture, leads the Quitting Social Media project, a research initiative exploring how people navigate the pleasures and pressures of always-on connectivity culture. Her work asks not whether social media is good or bad, but how we negotiate it, and whether a deliberate, temporary step back might actually be part of a healthier relationship with it long-term.
You don't have to go nuclear
The usual advice is all-or-nothing. Delete everything, go offline, and become a person who reads physical newspapers. It sounds peaceful. It’s also, for most of us, neither sustainable nor necessary. The guilt of failing to quit completely can feel worse than the scrolling itself.
What tends to work better is a strategic break, a defined period of reduced or no social media use, chosen consciously rather than arrived at by accident. I tried this during my January deadlines: I set a clear endpoint (for example, "until I've submitted"), told my close friends so they knew to text rather than tag me, and found that having a defined finish line made it feel manageable rather than punishing. I know I'm not the only one who's found this.
"I kept telling myself I'd just check notifications for five minutes, but I was spending hours scrolling without even realising it," says Jess, a King's student. "I set a hard rule: no phone after 22.00 for a week. By day three, I was actually sleeping properly for the first time in months."
The hardest part for me was the boredom. Boredom is usually what pulls you back, so filling the gap deliberately matters more than you might expect. A walk, a podcast, time with people in the same room: anything that gives your brain a different kind of rest.
What you might actually miss, and what you won't
To be fair to the apps you might miss things. An event you'd have wanted to know about. A conversation that moved on without you. The low-level hum of feeling connected to the wider world. Most of it will still be there when you come back. The things that genuinely matter — the people, the opportunities — tend to reach you through more than one channel.
The goal is not to make social media the enemy. It’s to make your own attention feel like yours again, especially during the weeks when everything else is asking for a piece of it. Assessments have a deadline. The apps will wait.
If anxiety around this time of year is affecting you more broadly, King's Student Services Online has support available, including resources on managing anxious feelings. You can also reach out to your Faculty Wellbeing Advisor for personalised support.