Instagram Urges Its Users to Take a Breather With Its New Feature "Take a Break"

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, announced in November that the company was testing the newest feature that Instagram plans on integrating, a feature called “Take a Break”. The announcement was made with a video he posted on his Instagram, stating that the feature’s main purpose is giving the users the tools they need to take a break from the platform.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CWGgR-7gO8I/

Mosseri also stated that this is currently available to a small percentage of users, since it’s in a testing phase, but most of the users should have access to “Take a Break” once Instagram is comfortable with how their feature is working, possibly sometime this month.

“Meta” is currently doing everything in their power to recover from the Whistleblower incident, where according to research that was done on teenagers, most of them experienced an addiction to Instagram and had issues getting off the platform. Therefore, Instagram’s developers are currently creating something within the app - after a duration of time, the app will be sending out reminders for you to “take a break”.

Hopefully, this will give people more control on their activity time on the app. The feature will serve as a reminder, it will show up to suggest you take 10, 20 or 30 minutes breaks after you’ve spent some time using the app.

How will the reminders show up? Let’s say you’re scrolling through your Instagram feed, and you receive break reminders in between posts, and you select the duration of your choosing. This is supposed to assist users in spending less time daily on the app, since it has been proven that social media can be draining and cause mental health issues. Having such a feature would help users to make them aware of having spent a solid amount of time on Instagram, so they can put their phones down for a while. Besides for the break reminders in the app, there will also be suggestions showing up, giving users ideas on how to spend the time off Instagram - writing down their thoughts, listening to their favorite songs, or doing something on their to-do list.

According to Mosseri, they are doing everything in their power to help users get the best experience on Instagram, since it’s among the leading social media platforms on the market. However, after being handed the tools, it will be completely up to the users on whether they will start using the feature as a helpful method, or they simply wish to spend the same amount of time on the app, regardless of “Take a Break” rolling out.