Hi lovelies,
It’s important to pay attention to your mental health, and with that in mind, you might be starting to wonder how your mental health is impacted by your use of social media. This is something that more and more people are considering as social media plays an ever bigger role in our lives.
It’s certainly true that social media can be damaging in many ways, even if it’s useful and enjoyable in lots of ways too. Managing your usage better and not letting it negatively impact you is key, and we’re going to discuss how you can do that below.
Track and Limit Your Time on Social Media
First of all, you should track the time you’re spending on social media. When you actually see the daily or weekly numbers in front of you, you might be surprised by just how much time you’re spending on social media. From there, you can think about limiting and restricting your time on social media in some way so that it doesn’t become a massive drain on your time.
Take Breaks When You Start to Feel the Mental Strain
When you start to feel like social media is damaging your mental health of draining your energy in some way, you should think about taking a break and seeing what it does for you. Take a few breaks and refresh. When you come back, you might want to use social media differently, or you might find that you don’t miss using those platforms very much at all. That’s something for you to decide on.
Don’t Compare Your Life to What You See on Social Media
The worst thing you can do is compare your life to what other people are showing of their lives on social media. Try not to compare yourself to other and don’t get sucked in by the pretty pictures people paint of themselves and their lives on social media. If you start comparing your life unfavorably to what you see on social media, it’s probably time to take a step back.
Have Separate Private and Public Social Media Accounts
If you want to make sure that your private details and information stay private and aren’t out there on social media for the world to see, you can turn your accounts to private. But if you also need a public social media profile for professional or career reasons, you could create two separate accounts; one private and one public. You can find out answers to questions like how many instagram accounts can i have and learn how to set up multiple accounts online if that’s something you want to do.
Tame Your Follows
When you’re following too many people, it can be very overwhelming. It can lead to you scrolling and scrolling forever because there are always more posts to discover. If that’s something you want to avoid, you should try to tame your follows and only follow people that you feel offer value. There’s nothing wrong with cutting down the number of people you follow from time to time. It makes things a lot more manageable and a lot less overwhelming.
Turn Off Notifications
Notifications are a tricky one. On the one hand, most people want to be alerted when there’s something happening on social media or when someone likes their posts. However, if you’re constantly being notified of every little thing, it can be a massive drain on your attention, meaning you’re constantly thinking about and focusing on social media rather than doing things that are important and productive in your day to day life. That’s why you might want to think about turning those notifications off.
Identify a Purpose
Finally, it’s a good idea to think about the reasons why you’re using social media. Is it bringing you joy? Are you using it for professional reasons or networking? Everyone should know why they’re using social media. And if when you think about that question you can’t find a good reason for using social media in the first place, you should probably reconsider your decisions. Taking some time away from social media to consider what it’s doing for you might not be a bad idea.
Social media can be testing and it becomes a little too much for your mental health from time to time. So be sure to make the most of the ideas above if you want to manage your social media presence a little better and keep your mental health balanced and in check at the same time.
