How Does Social Media Affect Mental Health?

This Is How To Make Social Media Less Toxic

Should I delete my Social Media?

As the negative impact of social media on our brains and here is a question many people are reckoning with

For many creatives, it’s complicated by the fact that business today is often done on social platforms.

I feel like I need to be on social media to know what’s going on in the world, to stay close with my friends

• Take a month off

If you are feeling like social media is wasting your time and giving you anxiety, I suggest you have a break from all of it for one month and see how you feel. In the meantime, find other ways of connecting with people via direct email and meeting up in real life. You may find more joy in interacting with people this way and the experience can make you not miss social media.

Ideally you want to be able to enjoy social media for entertainment, socializing and professional development on your own terms.

If you are checking social media more than once every hour, for more than a few minutes at a time, it’s clearly become a distraction from being present and engaged in your world. Your world is more complex, beautiful, and meaningful than other people’s worlds represented on social media.

• Change your settings

The first thing I always suggest to anyone feeling this way (and you’re not alone!) is to turn off all the notifications for your social media apps so you aren’t responding to their every beckoning chirp. The only notifications I have active on my phone are incoming calls and texts. This way people can still reach me when they need to, but when I’m going to bed, even those notifications go into airplane mode. As a result of not receiving every single ‘like’ as a notification, what happens is that I only check Instagram when I actually want to. That could mean I won’t see a notification for a few minutes, a few hours, or even a few days. I don’t even have Facebook on my phone anymore. So as a result, I check that even less.

When I feel that my use of social media is just bringing on more toxic feelings than good, I sometimes completely uninstall all the apps for a while and ask any friends or family I regularly speak with on those platforms to contact me in another way (like through text or email)

Professionally, if I just want to be off social media but still need to stay active, I find the best way is to go on. Post what I need to post, and then get off again without looking at the feed, likes, notifications, etc.

“Overall, you don’t have to take an all or nothing approach to social media instead, there are small changes you can make to your habits and alert settings that can make a big difference”

• Deactivation is your friend

I shudder to think of the actual months if not entire years I have wasted scrolling, retweeting, clicking, filtering, posting, editing, and sharing.

I feel you.

As long as I’m not traveling, I delete most social apps from my phone so when I’m stuck in a line somewhere or waiting for an appointment I’ll choose to read a book instead of being tempted to scroll until I hate all of humanity.

You get the idea, you want to make a change (otherwise, why ask for advice?)

So, find the places where you can do that. You will adjust to it. You will feel better. It will be worth it.

Social media isn’t going away anytime soon :

• Try to find ways it can be more helpful
• More satisfying
• More entertaining
• More truly social
• Less of all the other things you don’t like. You know, sort of like life

At the end of the day, your career doesn’t depend on your visibility

• So is there a reason to stay?
• Is social media really making us more informed as to what’s going on in the world?
• Are we becoming less media-literate as we tacitly accept that the ‘news of the day’ begins and ends with whatever clickbait headlines we scroll past in our respective information silos?
• Are we really becoming more connected to our friends and family?
• Are we losing what it means to cultivate, develop and maintain relationships in exchange for ease and convenience?

Deleting your social media can feel like erasing a part of your identity, I get that. But I promise you that there is life afterward. It changes things, for sure.