Customizing your Instagram notifications can significantly enhance your mobile experience. It can also stop you from spending too much time on the app, especially when you never intended to open it. Here’s how I’ve customized my Instagram notifications to be less irritating.
1 Turning Off All Reel Suggestions
Reels are one of Instagram’s biggest time-sucks. You’re putting yourself at a huge disadvantage if you let the app send you suggestions via your push notifications, which is why I switched these off as part of my social media reintegration strategy.
I’ll still see Reels when I open the Instagram app, but to be honest, I find these quite easy to ignore. Occasionally, I’ll find one that interests me—but I frankly find most of them boring.
To turn off Reel suggestions, go to Settings > Notifications > Live and reels. I recommend setting each area to Off, but if you only want to switch off Reels suggestions, switch off Reels suggested for you and Recently uploaded reels.
2 Enabling Quiet Mode
One big reason I deleted my old Instagram account was because I felt like I had little control over notifications. I know that many people suggest turning off everything, but to be honest, all that did was make me more inclined to open the app and check if there was anything new. After returning to the app following a year’s break, I realized I could utilize Quiet Mode; and doing so has been a game-changer.
When Quiet Mode is activated, Instagram won’t send notifications to your device. At the end of each Quiet Mode session, you’ll see a summary if you received new interactions in the app. I don’t like that you can only enable Quiet Mode for up to 12 hours daily, but it’s better than nothing.
I enable Quiet Mode each weekday from 6am to 6pm. I don’t have a problem with checking notifications before bed, but I used to wake up in the middle of the night to do so. So, if this is an issue for you, I recommend pausing all of your Instagram notifications.
A significant number of comments I receive on Instagram are spam. Apart from that, a decent proportion of them are from users trying an outdated strategy where they leave pointless comments to improve their visibility or get my attention. I find both annoying and I would rather limit the comment notifications I see.
Similarly, I only really want to receive messages from people I follow. I’m happy to manually check my message requests, but I don’t want to see “Random User wants to send you a message” appear on my device.
Limiting message and comment notifications is the easiest way to control both. I turn off all message request notifications, and for comments, I set this to From profiles I follow. I also turn off Comment daily digest and Story Comments. All of these are accessible via Posts, stories, and comments.
It’s also possible to control who can comment on your Instagram posts if you want to take things one step further.
4 Disabling All Notifications Sent by Instagram
I’ll be 100% honest with you: I think every notification sent by Instagram is pointless, and I also believe you’re wasting your time if you have most of them switched on. Instagram normally sends notifications about ads, product announcements, trending places, and more. The only ones I think are worth (maybe) having on are:
- Support requests.
- Ads (if you run a business account and place ads on Instagram).
I have turned every category off, and you can access these in the From Instagram section of the Notifications tab. You can always experiment to see if there are any that you’d like to keep switched on, but on a personal level, I found almost all of them to be pointless.
5 Turning Off Account Suggestions
While I like seeing account suggestions in the Instagram app, I only want to view them on my own terms. I don’t like receiving notifications because I won’t just go onto the app and follow one account. It almost inevitably results in going down a rabbit hole and spending at least 15 minutes on the app that I didn’t intend to.
You can turn off this notification by going to Following and followers > Account suggestions > Off. It’s also possible to remove Instagram follow suggestions from your feed, but I personally don’t find this a huge problem.
6 Disabling Email Notifications
Emails are peculiar because they’re both really useful and potentially quite annoying at the same time. I like receiving valuable newsletters and product suggestions, but I cannot stand receiving emails that tell me when someone has done something on social media. So, I had no problems whatsoever disabling all email notifications from Instagram.
Instagram sends several email notification types, including offers to provide feedback and notification reminders. Support emails are the only ones I’d recommend keeping switched on; I’ve turned these on but disabled everything else.
You’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the Notifications tab and navigate to Email notifications. While you’re here, I also suggest going into Shopping and toggling Suggested for you off. You can also get rid of annoying Instagram ads if these are a problem for you.
7 Not Allowing “Live Activity” Notifications
I like having Live Activity notifications when I’ve ordered an Uber or have a food delivery on the way, but I don’t find them very useful for Instagram. The only exception is when you’re uploading a post and want to keep up with its uploading percentage to ensure it ends up on your page.
You can follow the tips in this separate guide to Live Activities on your iPhone to turn the feature off. These steps will apply to any other apps where you don’t want this feature to appear.
I don’t recommend turning off all notifications for Instagram, and I think that doing this can cause more problems than it solves. However, controlling your notifications—and only keeping the essential ones on—is a good idea. Start by switching off suggestions, limiting messages and comments, and following the other things I’ve mentioned in this guide.
