I deleted TikTok as a college student. It saved my mental health.

In March 2020, I finally downloaded TikTok.

The app had been a big thing at my high school for a while and I was one of the last holdouts. But when COVID hit and my school canceled in-person classes for what ended up being the rest of my junior year, TikTok suddenly seemed essential. I could share TikToks in friend group chats and feel a part of something even though I was – like everyone else – stuck alone in my room.

At first, my algorithm showed me content about life during lockdown – jokes, news, tips for social distancing. I started watching exercise videos. I had been on my school’s swim team and suddenly couldn’t access my favorite way of working out. TikTok had lots of tips for how to work out in your room. I was learning about weight lifting and exercising alongside Chloe Ting.

My algorithm took a dangerous turn

Then my algorithm shifted. It started mixing in videos about how to eat healthy, which made sense  – at first. Then it layered in videos about cutting calories. Then TikToks of young women my age documenting how little they could eat in a day. It all seemed relevant and useful. I remember one video advising that when you’re hungry, just chew on some ice cubes. As an impressionable teen girl, I thought it was great advice. 

I didn’t notice at first that my exercise regiment became aggressive, then obsessive. Following the guidance of TikTok influencers, I ate too much some days and nothing at all on others. I may have looked “healthy” but my mindset was not.

Then I went off to college. It was a tough transition. In addition to struggling with my feelings towards my body, I was now living over 1,000 miles away from my family and simultaneously going through my first real break up. It was a lot, and the algorithm picked up on all of it. 

Each time I went on TikTok – often reflexively a dozen times a day –  I was sucked away from what I was doing into an emotional hole. One video about not spending Thanksgiving with family made me FaceTime my mom in tears. Another video of a stranger crying about their high school breakup led me to pack up my study material at the library and crawl into bed. 

I thought TikTok was connecting me with other people going through the same thing. I thought it was helping me finally look the way I was supposed to look. 

But it wasn’t doing those things at all. Instead TikTok created a vortex of my hurts and amplified them until I couldn’t hear anything else.

How the TikTok algorithm works

Open TikTok and you see a rapid-fire stream of engaging videos, many not more than a minute long, with music and effects and charismatic people dancing or telling jokes or dispensing advice. An algorithm curates what you see, tailoring your video stream to your tastes. It does it so well there’s a running joke that it can read your mind.

This algorithm uses standard social media data – your likes, shares, location and who you follow – to pick the content you see. But TikTok takes it to the next level, using how many seconds you linger on a video to gauge your interest at an increasingly granular level, picking up on subtleties no social media platform has ever been able to do before. This detailed data collection is what fuels the algorithm that makes the app so popular.

Lots of people love the algorithm’s ability to mold itself to your interests. But for others, its relentless pursuit of content you can’t look away from can catch you in a dangerous undertow, with no real tools for pulling yourself out.

TikTok can be bad for teens

In 2021, The Wall Street Journal published a massive investigation demonstrating how the algorithm works. It created over 100 automated TikTok bot accounts, each with assigned interests – like “yoga” or “forestry” – that weren’t shared with the app. The bots were programmed to linger or re-watch videos related to their assigned interest. Within just a couple of hours, the algorithm picked up on what every single bot was assigned, and inundated their feeds with that content.

One bot was assigned “sadness” and “depression”. The bot watched the entirety of one popular video with the hashtag #sad, and then another several videos later. Shortly after, the bot’s feed became “a deluge of depressive content”; 93% of the videos the algorithm served were about sadness, mental health struggles and eventually self-harm.

This phenomenon is called “rabbit holing.” First the algorithm picks up on a general interest you have and shows you the most popular content with the most views and likes. When it eventually runs out mainstream stuff, it reaches into more remote corners of the app to find you more. Out here, the TikToks have fewer views. They’re less likely to be vetted by the app’s moderation system. And they’re more likely to be dangerous.

Of the 100 bots, a dozen of them were registered as 13 year old girls with an interest in weight loss content. Within a few weeks, they were served tens of thousands of videos with extreme dieting tips (how to eat fewer than 300 calories a day), calorie-cutting challenges (lose as much weight before Christmas as you can) and deeply disturbing fads (eat so little you can see your bones). 

Once your algorithm gets in a rut, the only real option to pull yourself out is to delete your account, make a new one, and start again. 

By the time I was in college, more extreme content sometimes made its way to my screen. But I struggled even when the algorithm showed me milder videos. Opening TikTok was like being told “hey, you feel lonely, remember?” Or “don’t forget to eat as little as you can.” It was a daily stumbling block, making it that much harder to invest in my new life.

So I deleted TikTok

When I went home for Christmas break my freshman year of college, I didn’t feel like my normal self. I couldn’t go a day without analyzing everything about my body.

Before getting on the plane I thought about my younger sister. Would she think this weird, negative relationship I had developed with my body was normal? I didn’t want that. I wanted her to know that feeling good in your body was better than chasing a distorted ideal curated by an algorithm. To set that example, I had to take back my life. I had to be healthier, both mentally and physically.

And that meant deleting the app.

It was a great decision

It was hard at first – I constantly got the urge to pick up my phone and scroll, even though there was no TikTok there to distract me. But soon after hitting the delete button, I started to notice positive changes.

Deleting TikTok was good for my wallet

One of the perks I didn’t expect was that after deleting TikTok, I started saving more money. I went back and did the math recently, and in my first semester of college I think I spent about $700 – eating up most of my summer savings – on stuff I saw on TikTok. Materialism is embedded in TikTok’s culture – the app is full of videos of people touting products. Since TikTok rolled out TikTok Shop last year, enabling you to make purchases without leaving the app, it’s only become more so. 

Now, as a recent college grad who studied environmental science, I’ve started thinking a lot about consumption and our impact on the planet. The fast fashion and other impulse purchases TikTok is set up to encourage come with resource extraction, carbon emissions and eventually throwing these temporary and often plastic-filled purchases in landfills. It’s not a sustainable way to live, financially or environmentally.

Deleting TikTok was good for my mental health

Of all the things I’ve learned post-TikTok, the most profound is how much my attention matters. When I used TikTok, so much of my free time was filled with noise – ads, fitness challenges, beauty ideals, hyper-charged news. My mind was constantly buzzing with a surplus of information that it didn’t have time to sort through. 

When I hit delete, at first I often felt restless and bored. But boredom, I came to find, is not evil and not an emotion to be scared of. A bit of boredom inspired me to think clearly and be intentional with my resources. 

How we choose to spend our time and money ultimately shapes the trajectory of our lives. I can either spend hours a day scrolling or I can read that book, call my friends, go on a walk. I’m less tempted to spend my money on random trinkets and clothes that go out of style in two months, rather than save for taking trips to visit my family. And instead of TikTok’s algorithm influencing my mindset about my body, I have my own. I’m not as bombarded by messages of comparison and perfection. My mindset is more based on balance and actually feeling good. 

And I’m not going back

It’s been 2 years since deleting TikTok and I have no intention of going back. There’s no doubt that TikTok can be a place of funny and useful videos. Being in a very different place in my life, rejoining TikTok would likely be a different experience. Still, I don’t want to make it a part of my life again. I like feeling more engaged with my life and not watching it pass me by because I can’t get off my phone. After deleting the app, I feel much more in the driver’s seat – and not the algorithm’s passenger.