As we talked in the previous blog 99 Days of Freedom: Who Goes Back Early? the first topic of Day 33 Topics is Withdrawal: first, felt, days, day, check.

(Source: http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/)

Responses for this topic often described one initial set of experiences, generally negative, sometimes followed by a different set of experiences, often positive. Many of these responses discuss habit, perceived addiction, withdrawal, and so on:

“In the first 10 days, I thought about Facebook a lot. Whenever I opened up a browser, my fingers would automatically go to ‘f’. On day 9, I had a dream about accidentally logging in to Facebook—which showed that I was consciously thinking about it.”

“I was experiencing withdrawal and felt socially disconnected. The impluse to check FB was very strong, especially when I was feeling low. I caved in after about a week, and began checking FB a few times a day for about a week. But then I decided to quit FB again, which again only last 2-3 days. For the past 4 days I have been checking FB once-twice a day, spending around 5 min per day in total.”

Respondents who described such initial withdrawal-like experiences, even if eventually overcome, were more likely to return to Facebook.

Reference

Baumer, E.P.S., Guha, S., Quan, E., Mimno, D., & Gay, G. (2015). How Non-use Experiences Influence the Likelihood of Social Media Reversion: Perceived Addiction, Boundary Negotiation, Subjective Mood, and Social Connections. Social Media + Society.