Five months ago, I accidentally uninstalled Instagram. After a while, instead of putting it back, I made it intentional. Let me see how this feels.
Over the past few months, I have reinstalled it only when I needed to share or watch something specific. The rest of the time it has not been on my phone.
I feel significantly calmer.
I realised Instagram had been a constant source of noise in a brain that is already noisy by nature.
So I started asking people if they felt the same. I watched YouTubers openly talk about quitting Instagram for good. And I went looking for studies. Here is what is actually happening.
Top-line numbers look fine. Instagram has around 3 billion monthly active users and Meta projects 3.55% growth in 2026. But underneath:
- Organic engagement fell roughly 24% year over year in 2025 (source)
- Instagram lost about 4 million users in 2024 before resuming growth (source)
- 52% of Gen Z attempted to quit social media in 2025. The number one stated motivation was mental health (source)
- A Stanford randomised study of over 35,000 users found that people who deactivated Instagram for six weeks reported a measurable improvement in happiness, anxiety and depression. The effect was driven specifically by women under 25 (Allcott, Gentzkow et al., 2025)
So this is not just a me thing. It is happening at scale, and the people leaving most are the ones most affected.
The PM question
If I were a PM at Instagram and I sat with the engagement data, the wellbeing research, and the quiet exit of women under 25, I would not start with "how do we hold them longer."
I would ask: which design choices make this app actively harder for someone who cares about their own mental health?
Feature 1: Infinite reel scroll, accessible from everywhere
From the bottom nav, from the search tab, from a single reel on a profile, you land in a vertical autoplay feed with no end. One tap, no friction, infinite content.
There is no natural stopping cue. Once you enter reels, you do not exit. You scroll until something outside the app interrupts you.
Feature 2: Stories that auto-advance, with view counters
Stories play one after the other with no break. The next one loads automatically. And every story shows you exactly who watched it, in what order.
Two harms in one design. Auto-advance removes the stopping cue. The view counter turns sharing into surveillance. You upload, then check, then check again.
Feature 3: Explore, personalised by what holds attention
Explore is not a feed of things you chose to follow. It is an algorithmic feed optimised on what keeps you scrolling. The algorithm has learned that bodies, lifestyles, and aspirational content drive that. So that is what it serves.
The Royal Society for Public Health ranked Instagram worst out of five major platforms for body image and FOMO. Explore is the surface where that happens at scale.
What I would push for
- Reels with built-in stopping cues. After a set number of reels, a real pause, not a dismissable nudge.
- Stories without auto-advance. One story plays. You choose to play the next one.
- A view counter that is private to the poster, off by default. Or remove it entirely.
- Explore that you can opt into, not the default surface when you open the app.
But changing three features is not the real argument.
The argument
You cannot ask a user to use Instagram in a mindful, informed way when the product is designed to outpace mindfulness.
The brain is wired to feed on negativity once it is fed. The app is engineered to find that signal and serve more of it. Telling users to "just be more aware" is asking them to win against an architecture built to outpace their willpower. Even the most educated, most aware people lose this fight. That is why they quit.
And quitting is not free. Instagram is twenty years embedded into how people stay connected, run small businesses, see family across countries. Most people cannot just walk away. Most people also do not have the cultural exposure to even name what is happening to them.
So the responsibility cannot sit on the user. It has to sit on the people building the product.