Disable your Instagram account

Over the last decade, Instagram has become a huge phenomenon. It turned 11 years old a few days ago, and we can find anyone and everything on Instagram nowadays. We can follow our friends, enemies, celebrities, businesses… And thanks to the billion pictures all these people post we can find so many inspiration on so many topics. Pets and other animals, food, fashion, sports, you name it! Despite the huge success, people are getting more and more interested in disabling their Instagram account.

All this information and pictures of people “showing off” can sometimes feel overwhelming to us, making us want to take a break from Instagram. Some people delete their entire Instagram account in one of those bewildered moments where they feel they just need to catch a breath, deleting every information and photos from their profile that one has so carefully selected.  But why would we want to delete our Instagram account if we can just disable it?

Instagram does make it difficult for its users to delete, or even disable their account. Of course, they want as many users as possible, so the “eliminate” or “temporary disable” buttons are deeply hidden within their setting options.

Besides Instagram making it hard to delete our account, a lot of users regret it once they have realised what they have done, so we actually should thank Instagram to make it this difficult, so we don’t go ahead and delete our entire account in a temporary impulse.

So first, let’s see why anyone would want to delete their account, and what option we have besides deleting.

Deleting your Instagram account

One of the main reasons people delete their account is because suddenly they realise how much time they are spending on social media, which is kind of a useless way to pass time. Did you know that the average time spend on social media, including Instagram, is about two and a half hours! Imagine if we dedicated that time to something else, like learning a new language or a new skill. Once people realise the time they are losing and not getting back, the impulse to delete the account is suddenly very high, and very understandable. Nevertheless, another option is to put a time limit on your Instagram app, or even or your phone, or to temporary disable your Instagram account to give yourself a break and give yourself an Instagram detox.

It could also be that our loved ones are getting tired of sitting next to someone who can’t stop posting on Instagram everything they do, or who have to check their Instagram feed every hour because of their fear of missing out, also called FOMO. If we really love our loved ones, maybe it’s time to temporarily deactivate our account so we can spend more quality time with them.

Or imagine you are going on vacation. How can we not post a picture of those gorgeous views, or upload a story of the wonderful meals we are having in luxurious restaurant. But when we are taking those thousand pictures of the beach, to catch the perfect moment for the perfect post, are we really enjoying our vacation? Maybe this seems like a good time to temporarily deactivate our account so we can fully enjoy every moment. We can still make photos and we can always upload them when we are back, without missing anything while we are at our destination.

There are even cases where we are applying for a serious job, and we don’t want our recruiters to see all the crazy things we might do on our time of. So while we are in the application process, disabling our Instagram account may be a good idea to make sure we can give a good impression.

The only case we might recommend to entirely delete the account is when the Instagram account was created for a business and that business no longer exists. But still then we could start by temporarily disable it, you never you if things may turn around! Deleting is still an option.

What happens when we disable our Instagram account?

For starters, and this is the most important thing to know, is that when we disable our account, IT ISN’T DELETED. This is important to know, so that you don’t have to be afraid of losing all your photos, contacts or other information from your Instagram account.

The main difference between deleting your Instagram account and disabling it, is that every piece of information from your account will remain, being able to reclaim it whenever you are ready.

So what are the consequences of disabling our Instagram account temporarily?

First of all, the account will disappear, meaning that it cannot be found by other Instagram users. But this disappearance is just temporary, as it will be shown again once we reactivate it.

Also, our username will remain the same, so we don’t have to worry about losing our username or inventing a new one.

All our posted pictures will still be there when we return in the exact some order with all the comments and likes. It will be like it never went away! But while it is deactivated, no one will be able to see these pictures, seeming like your profile doesn’t exist.

Your followers will also still be there, as well as the ones you follow, and your messages. Like said, once we are done with our temporarily disabling and we want our profile back, it will be restored to the moment we disabled it, looking like we never left.

Instagram will store all of your data, but will delete it from their platform. That means that not only you won’t lose your followers, they are not even able to unfollow you as you are no longer in their following list, so there is no way they are able to find your account.

There is one thing to take into consideration: Instagram only allows us to disable our account once a week. So when we temporarily disable our account, and we reactivate it, we will have to wait a whole week before we can disable it again. The goal of Instagram, as we stated before, is to have active users, so this is probably one of the reasons we can’t disable it more than once in seven days.

So now you know all the benefits of disabling your account temporarily, which as we can see is a better option than just deleting it which will make all the information we have on the Instagram platform disappear. Imagine all the time you have put into selection the right pic for your post, into creating highlighted stories, and gaining followers, only to permanently loose it by one click. I don’t think there is anybody who could thing this is a good idea just because we are currently a bit tired of Instagram. So my recommendation is to always disable your account for the time being, and if after a long time you still don’t miss it, you can always decide to delete it later on. In fact, when you are going to delete your account, Instagram will always first recommend you to temporarily disable it itself.

Once that you are convinced you want to disable your account temporarily, you’ll have to know how to do it, and what buttons to click.

How to temporarily deactivate your Instagram account

1. The first step is to make sure you want to temporarily deactivate it. Most of the time, it’s just an impulse that will only last a few minutes. But once you are truly convinced, it’s better to know how to do it than to spend a lot of time figuring it out and getting upset with Instagram for making it so hard.Because disabling your account is indeed very difficult. For starters, you can’t disable it from the Instagram app, but it requires you do it through an internet browser on your desktop.
2. Then you will have to log in into your account, if you have more than just one, make sure you are logging in into the correct one!
3. We then have to go to our Instagram profile. We can get there by clicking on our profile picture in the right corner, next to the search bar and our notification symbol. Then we click “profile” from the list of options we get.
4. Instagram will lead us directly to the “edit profile” options, among others. Here, we just stay in that first section, and we scroll down all the way to the bottom, until we find the “temporarily disable my account” option.

5. Now, Instagram will ask you WHY you would want to temporarily disable your account. This is so they can collect data and reasons why users deactivate their accounts, so that they can do something about it if there seems to be one main reason. It will also ask for your password, to prevent people who aren’t the actual user to disable other people’s account as part of a joke or a revenge for something.

The reasons you can choose of why you are disabling your account are various, among which is the “I just need a break”, a reason we have discussed earlier, that is one of the main causes for people to deactivate their account. Too busy or too distracting is another reason that makes people want to disable their account. Some of the reasons are problems like not finding followers or wanting to delete something, but in these cases, disabling your Instagram account may not be the best option. In these cases, we can always wright Instagram trough it help centre to give us some other solutions rather than disabling our account.


6. Once we selected a reason and we fill in our password, the button “temporarily disable account” will become available to click on.

After clicking, they will ask again if you are sure you want to continue to disable your account, but once confirmed, your account will be disabled. This means no one will find you on Instagram; you can’t upload any photos or stalk anyone’s profile, so you will be able to catch a much needed break.

You can keep it disabled for as long as you like. A day, a week, a year, it’s up to you.

But what about reactivating it?

How to reactivate my Instagram account

Once we have disabled our Instagram account, we might feel after a while that we are missing it, and want it back. Or maybe the job we applied for what made us disable our account to give a better impression was given to someone else, and we can go back to post crazy photos of ourselves.

There is one restriction to keep in mind when we want to reactive our account: it can only been done after 24 hours of disabling it. This is so that users won’t activate and disable constantly, giving Instagram a hard time storing and recovering data.

Once these 24 hours of having our Instagram account disabled, we want to get it back, the only thing we have to do is to log in. Simply go to your app or your browser, and type in your username and password. Instagram will understand you wish to reactivate it, and will restore all your pictures, followers, biography and other information. Easy!

One last thing

We shouldn’t abuse this temporarily disable account option Instagram gives us, since it does give Instagram a hard time. The normal waiting time between deactivating and reactivating is a week, but if we do it too often, we might need to wait more than just those 7 days.  It could even happen if we continuously disable and enable our account that Instagram decides to disable it for us, making us enter a hard process to get it back.

But beside this restriction, disabling your Instagram account temporarily is a great solution to catch a break and get back to earth, enjoying the little moments without feeling the urge to post every detail of our life. And now you know exactly how to temporarily disable your Instagram account, with all the benefits this can give you.