May 11, 2022
Many of us understand the importance of making responsible decisions about the food we consume.
What if we were to apply that same thinking to the content we consume from the internet and social media channels?
It’s Mental Health Awareness Week and now would be a good time to start taking control instead of passively scrolling through Instagram, Twitter and the like.
These platforms open us up to all sorts of opinions, stories and sometimes trauma, from all over the world.
And if we engage with it at all - even reading it out of curiosity or sharing it because it makes us angry and we want a friend to see how terrible it was - the social media algorithms mistake that for interest and give us more and more of the content that isn’t really doing us any good.
It becomes an echo chamber but there are things you can do to take back control.
One is to mute certain people and keywords and phrases.
Or to start again with a new clean account, leaving the past behind.
Use ‘airplane mode’ on your phone during the working day which will help you kick the habit if you’re constantly checking social media feeds and then restrict your use to certain times.
Often we get sucked into social media because we’re scared of missing out - we can’t give up completely because the connections and information are important to us.
But that doesn’t mean it has to dominate our lives and there are steps we can take to make sure the content we do see is doing us some good rather than making us anxious and angry.