Episode 2: Ditch Doom Scrolling for Bloom Scrolling
Description: Bloom scrolling is the opposite of doom scrolling, and it starts with taking control of your social media feed. In this episode, Tina Boogren shares how unfollowing negative accounts and curating a feed full of joy, laughter, and inspiration can retrain your brain to notice more good.
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Transcription: Hi, and welcome to Everyday Wellness with Dr. Tina H. Boogren. I am your host, Tina Boogren. I am so happy to be back with all of you. This is episode two of season seven, and I hope that you were able to play around with last week's invitation, which was all about utilizing that reticular activating system in our best interest. So perhaps you woke up and said out loud, "Today is going to be a great day." Or you wrote in your journal, "Today is going to be the best day of my life." Or you continued or started that list of all the good things that happened to you, and started reflecting at the end of the day of, "Wow, look at all the great things that happened today," to just keep your mind in the place where you're scanning the world, looking for good rather than for all the things that are really hard or all of the bad news that is so easy to find and so easy to creep into our lives if we're not careful.
And in fact, that leads me to what I want to offer up as this week's invitation. So I think most of us, probably all of us, know the term doom scrolling, right? Which refers to, oh my gosh, spending an ungodly sometimes amount of time scrolling via social media, and really what we're looking at is a whole lot of negative junk, right? The just overall news can be so hard to hear and for me, even when I'm trying to follow educational sites or, you know, health sites, wellness sites, I feel like the headlines oftentimes are these negative headlines, which I know is to try to grab our attention. But all of this is just then filling our brain with this doom and gloom and bad news, right?
And again, think about that reticular activating system. We start to really absorb all of that, and the story we start telling ourselves is, "Everything is awful." And if we tell ourselves everything is awful, we have kicked that reticular activating system into play, and our brain says, "Great, you want to believe everything is awful? Let me scan your surroundings and your environment looking for awful things that will support that claim that you have." So it just kind of feeds into, if we're not careful, this really kind of, ugh, ick place to be.
And so I ran across this new term of bloom scrolling, and I love it so much. So bloom scrolling is where we take control of our social media feed, and we unfollow and leave groups that don't work for us, and we pull ourselves out of kind of the doom and the gloom and the people and the accounts that don't make us happy, and we purposely set our feed up to be incredibly inspiring. So we make sure that if we are going to be scrolling, that what we are looking at are fun things that we love.
So I'm thinking puppies. I'm thinking babies giggling. I am thinking all those joyful accounts. I love when there's kind of something we all get around. Do you remember this summer, like, with the World Cup and all the visitors coming over and discovering Buc-ee's and ranch dressing? I mean, talk about just joyful accounts to follow. That's what I mean by bloom scrolling.
So in order to get your feed to a place where it feels like bloom scrolling, number one, first you have to spend some time really unfollowing, unfriending, letting go of anything that's not making you feel good. And just do it. I know we've talked about this invitation in seasons past, but sometimes it creeps back, so it's worth spending a little bit of time. So the next time that you're scrolling, just be thinking while you're scrolling, "Is this making me feel good or not? Can I let go of this?"
I was following a lot of different educators, and what started to happen, which was really frustrating, is it just kind of turned into just kind of bashing, ugh, the school and families and the job and professional learning opportunities, and it was getting really negative. And so that, to me, was a red flag of like, okay, this is not making me feel good. Unfollow, unfollow, unfollow. And I'm only holding onto the accounts where it's good stuff, celebrations in the classroom and in schools. Outside of the school realm, I also, again, just think about, is this account, is this friend, and I use that quote in quotes as in friends on social media. Is this someone bringing me joy or is this bringing me down? And you can unfollow. You can snooze for 30 days. You can take control. It's your feed. You get to decide what you want to look at and what you don't want to look at. And spend a little time kind of curating that so that when you do spend time online, it's tapping into the good.
Now, many of us, myself very much included, are wanting to spend less time online. I'm trying to kind of embrace the idea of “create more and consume less.” However, of course, there's moments and times where that mindless scroll can kind of feel good. And so I want to make sure that during that time, that I'm not looking at doom and gloom and negativity and all the horrible things, that instead I am following accounts and people and things that make me laugh and smile and these heartwarming stories. That feels really good, and it's feeding into this whole idea of kind of taking control of how I want to feel to the best of my ability and giving my brain that assignment of what to look for, what to recognize in the hopes of bringing just more positivity and joy and laughter.
I love, love when I find accounts that make me feel good. And here's deals. Share them with each other. I love, love, love to send reels and posts and just great stories to friends and family members, and they share them back, and it's always the good stuff. I love that so much. And there, we're tapping into a little bit of that social wellness, right? When we share the good stuff with each other, the things that make us laugh and think about each other, and again, tapping back into that, our own brain and how we are training our brain to interact with the world and our environment and the surroundings all around us.
So play around with a little bit of bloom scrolling this week. The opposite of doom scrolling. Start by really kind of curating your social media feed, and then enjoy and share with each other. Pop on over to the Facebook group because we can start sharing kind of what those great accounts are that we follow with each other. I think that would be fun to do, so I'll post over there and get that conversation started.
Oh, I'm cheering so hard for you guys. Thank you, Adrienne. Thank you, Solution Tree and Marzano Resources. Thank you for listening, being part of this group, and just being a badass in general. What an incredible group we have here. Cheering so hard for you guys. Make it a great week. I love you.
If this episode resonated with you, find more emotional wellness episodes here.
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