Imagine this scenario, you wake up on a Saturday and decide to have a relaxing day. Maybe you sleep in late, make a good breakfast and then spend the whole day binge watching your favorite shows. Maybe you throw in some laundry, maybe you don’t. Maybe you wash some dishes, maybe you don’t, maybe you shower, but probably not. You just have a lazy comfy slow-paced Saturday, and you feel great about it, until…. you decide to scroll through your social media pages and see what everyone else did with their perfectly comfy Saturday. Some of your friends had brunch plans, some people took the most amazing pictures outdoors, some went on hike or a bar crawl, some went shopping and found the best deals ever, one person re-organized her whole house and added bookshelves while another made a homemade wreath out of things purchased from the dollar store. Now and all the sudden you start to say to yourself, “Shit, what a waste, I did nothing with my day!”.
For most people, this happens several times a day. So many of us feel simply fine about our minute by minute decisions until later in the day or night when we compare our choices to the choices of our peers and then all the sudden our perception changes. In a brief moment we can go from feeling genuinely good and then mere seconds later (after checking social media accounts) instantly begin to feel like you have no plans, OR only subpar plans, OR you are left out of something, OR you feel lazy, OR you feel your relationship is not as good as someone else’s, but prior to checking social media you didn’t have any of those negative thoughts or feelings. THAT’S THE TRIGGERING EVENT. There is your evidence that social media is a huge trigger in your life that can cause you increased feelings of anxiety and/or feelings of negativity.
What can you do to change this trigger? You can modify this trigger one of three ways: Experiment, Set boundaries or straight up Detox. Here are examples of all three:
Choice 1: Experiment-Run a test on yourself.
Try to get through half of your day without social media. For instance, do not check any of your social media accounts until after lunchtime every day for one week. Before your noon time check, take note of how you feel in general and then compare this feeling to how you feel after you have scrolled through your social media pages. If after viewing some people’s pictures, comments or posts you feel more irritable, angry, down, or anxious then you can easily see the effects of social media on your mood.
Choice 2: Set Boundaries-Limit your time on social media daily.
Allow your self two hours per day. One hour in the morning and one hour in the later part of the day (but NOT before you go to bed.) Sometimes when we limit our exposure the effects of these images and triggers decrease in their strength because they are not constant all day long. Two bursts of this influence a day does less damage than images throughout the entire day.
Choice 3: Detox- Take an extended period off.
Can you go a whole 24-hour period without checking your social media? Can you go two days? What if you did? Would you feel more motivated to do other things, would you feel less stressed or less anxious? Would you feel better about what YOU did today when you are not comparing your day to other peoples? Try this and see. If you feel better when you decrease your exposure to social media, then you want to allow these detox days to occur more frequently to give your emotions a break.
Identifying triggers that tend to have a negative impact on our mental health is so important and social media has proven itself to be a strong trigger for many people. Hopefully, using these techniques above can help to reduce the effects of social media on your emotions and mood.