10 tips to make your social media bubble a happier place to be!
Social media can be an exhausting world to live in and it can have a negative effect on your mental health. Ask yourself these questions:
- Do your social feeds ever leave you feeling unworthy or unhappy?
- Are you fed up with scam posts and BS friends on Facebook?
- Tired of feeling less than perfect when comparing yourself to celebrities, influencers and friends who seem to have it all?
If you’ve answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, it sounds like it’s time to give your socials a much-needed shake-up. Check out our top 10 tips to give your social media the makeover it deserves!
- Go on a huge unfollow spree. Sit down with each of your social media accounts, one by one, and unfollow or block any account or individual who makes you feel any type of negative way about yourself. Only keep the people, brands and influencers who give you joy.
- Find new joy – seek out positive accounts to follow in place of the newly-deleted accounts. Look for influencers and brands who focus on positivity, self-love and loving the skin you’re in.
- Limit your social media intake. Take the occasional day off or aim to reduce your daily usage. Use this time to do fun things with friends or enjoy some downtime with a film or book.
- Cut back on your platforms. Ask yourself – do you need to be on every social media platform going? That’s a LOT of feeds to keep on top of and nobody needs that kind of pressure in their life. Think about which platforms you really want to keep and get rid of the ones you don’t need. Your phone and your mind will feel a lot less cluttered and your mental health will thank you for it.
- Set your accounts to private to keep unwanted friend requests at bay – and to reduce the volume of scam messages you receive in your inbox. Delete anyone on your friend list who you’ve never met in real life to keep your feeds safe from catfishes, predators and scammers.
- Hit that mute button! Got group chats pinging left, right and centre? Juggling various conversations can be stressful and exhausting. Don’t be afraid to hit the mute button to give yourself a breather. You can always check back later in the day, rather than pick up your phone every single time you hear a notification.
- Speaking of silence, have you ever tried switching your mobile to silent mode? Turn off the vibrate, too, to give yourself a proper break. Put your phone somewhere out of reach (or in another room, preferably) and aim to check it just a few times a day. It can take a bit of practice but, with time, you’ll learn to distance yourself from your phone.
- If you’re guilty of expecting instant responses to your messages and feel anxious when someone doesn’t get back to you straight away, try to teach yourself patience. Turn off read receipts or go off and do something else while you wait for a reply. The same goes for your response times – you don’t have to reply to every single message or text right away. Stop putting pressure on yourself to fire off rapid responses – give yourself a break and respond when you have time. The name of the game here is to chill on the communication front to reduce anxiety and pressure.
- Switch off from stories. As well as filling our feeds with content, many of us feel pressure to continually update our stories. This is a whole extra layer of pressure you can easily remove simply by going back to basics and focusing purely on your feed.
- Spring-clean your groups to streamline your feeds – if you’re still a member of a fan page for a band you no longer like or you keep seeing updates from a random meme page you’ve got no interest in, leave the group. It’s really easy to hit the ‘Leave Group’ button and you can always re-join in future if you want to.
Discover more ways to look after your mental health here: https://ionpadel.com/advice/for-me/mental-health/
