The loop, in order
Anxiety rises. You check. For a minute or two the uncertainty is resolved and the anxiety drops. Then whatever you saw needs interpreting, and it climbs back — usually above where it started. Your brain records only the relief, and asks for it again sooner.
This is the same mechanism behind other avoidance behaviours, and it explains the most confusing part: that checking makes you feel worse overall while feeling necessary in the moment.
Why willpower is the wrong tool
A resolution to stop has to be honoured dozens of times a day, in the exact moments when you have least capacity. You will keep it nineteen times and the twentieth resets the count — which then reads as proof you cannot do it.
Intermittent payoff makes it worse. If they post rarely, each check is a gamble with an occasional win, and intermittent rewards sustain behaviour more robustly than predictable ones. Nothing about this reflects on your character.
Changes that hold
Remove the access rather than the impulse. Mute or block, remove the app from the home screen, log out so re-entry takes a password, leave the group chats where they appear. The aim is to add friction, not to be perfect.
Then plan the first twenty minutes after the urge, which is when checking actually happens. Something specific and undemanding: leave the room, message a friend, put a timer on. A decision made in advance survives far better than one made in the moment.
When access is not the issue
If you block and then check through a friend's account, a second profile, or mutual friends' stories, you have closed one door in a corridor. That is worth noticing without self-reproach — it simply tells you the driver is the anxiety rather than the availability.
At that point the useful question changes from how to stop checking to what you are hoping to prevent by watching. The answer is usually some version of 'finding out first', and seeing that plainly is often what starts to loosen it.