Episode 30: Protecting Your Mental Health on Social Media

Tina Boogren
3 hours ago
6 min read

Description: Social media can connect us, inspire us, and make us feel less alone, but it can also leave us feeling overwhelmed and drained. In this episode, Tina shares two simple ways to create a healthier relationship with social media by curating your feed and taking intentional breaks. This invitation helps you protect your energy and feel more in control of what you consume.

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Transcription: Hi, and welcome to Everyday Wellness with Dr. Tina H. Boogren. I'm your host, Dr. Tina Boogren, and this is episode 30 of Everyday Wellness for this season, and I'm so happy you're here. Thank you for being here. You're amazing. I don't know if anyone's told you that this week, but hear me say this. It's that you are amazing.

I hope that last week you found some moments of joy and are able to pull those invitations into this week as well. In fact, I want to kind of talk about, in a roundabout way, another way that we can bring more joy into our life. And to do that, we're going to talk about social media. I know now everyone's at a different place here, but I just want to talk about something that I've been having lots of conversations with girlfriends about this and it's something that most of us interact with every single day, and we have very mixed emotions about our relationship with social media. So I am certainly not going to tell you that social media is terrible. I'm not going to tell you that you should delete all of your accounts and go live in the woods somewhere. Social media actually can be a really, really beautiful thing. In fact, that's the conversation that I've been having with my friends.

What social media can do on the good side, of course, is it connects us, it can introduce us to things that inspire us, it can make us laugh, it can remind us that we're not alone. Our community, our everyday wellness community on Facebook is one of the happiest places for me. I love to post over there related to the podcast each week and see what your responses are. So it's all good. It's all good. It can be such an incredible connector, but here's what we all know is that, uh, it's not always good, right?

A couple of things, our brains are always absorbing. And so even when we're trying to resist it, there's comparison, there's noise, there's that endless stream of information. And our feed can go from like serious world news to puppies to like, it's just this like onslaught of information. And so what I want us to talk about this week is just two really, really simple everyday wellness ideas that can help protect our wellness when it comes to social media.

So the first thing I want us to think about is curation. I think we've talked about it in the past, but I think it's time to talk about it again. Let's start there. So I want us to control our social media. One of the most empowering things for us to remember is that we actually have way more control of our social media than it sometimes feels like we do. We get to decide who and what shows up in our feed. We get to follow people and unfollow people. We get to mute or unfollow accounts that make us feel tense or overwhelmed or angry. We can choose content that brings joy, makes us laugh, or learn, or think, or feel more connected and we can quietly step away from the things that are draining our energy or making us just flat out not feel good. There is no rule that says that we have to keep seeing content that makes us feel bad. Let me say that again for myself and for you. There is no rule that says we have to keep seeing content that makes us feel bad. We are in control.

Here's the deal. I know we're polite kind of people and sometimes we hesitate to curate our feeds because it feels rude or we worry about what someone might think. But our feed is not a public service. Our feed is not a public service. It is a space that we interact with, some of us every single day, and it is essential that we make that space healthier for ourselves. Think about it the same way that you think about your home. You wouldn't invite people into your living room every day if they constantly made you feel stressed or small or angry. So it is okay to make thoughtful choices about what voices and messages you allow into your digital space, just like your home. Okay? Okay. So unfollow, mute, unfriend. go on a spree and enjoy it. Spend, I don't know, give yourself what? 10, 20, 30 minutes and decide that you are going to look through your accounts, and if something comes up that does not make you feel good, be done with it. Okay? That's step one.

Step two, I'm going to give all of us permission to step away. What we know is that of course, social media is designed, it's set up to keep us engaged, right? It is purposely meant to be addictive. We've got the notifications, we've got those constant updates, and as we all know, it's really, really easy to lose track of time or find ourselves checking our phones more often than we intended. I feel this myself. I see it in workshops all the time. We are addicted to our phones and to our feeds.

And what we know is that our brains need a pause. Again, this nervous system reset that we've been working on quite a few weeks here. Part of what we can do to reset our nervous system is to walk away from social media. It doesn't mean that you have to walk away forever, but taking a break can be really essential. There's not one way to do it, so maybe you decide that you are not checking social media first thing in the morning. This is something that I have done, I've mentioned here before. The minute that I wake up, I grab my journal and I write three pages. I do not touch my phone, certainly not social media, until significantly well into that morning time- that time with my journal is sacred. Social media does not come before that.

So maybe you just put your phone in another room for a while in the evening. Maybe you take a walk without your phone. I know that can feel crazy for some of us, but it feels really good sometimes to just walk away, like literally leave it. Maybe you take a full day, like all day Saturday or all day Sunday or Saturday and Sunday, and you walk away from social media. Maybe you take an entire month off. There's Offline October, but it doesn't mean you have to wait until October. Do it whenever you want.

And here's the key to doing that. See how much quieter your mind feels. See if you start to pay more attention to what's happening around you. See if your attention span starts to increase. Whenever I purposely do this, those are the things that I notice that I love, and so I'm really trying to incorporate longer breaks from social media into my life whenever I can.

And so those are the two things that I want us to think about this week. Let's curate our feed so that we don't immediately go down the shame comparison spiral, or are just looking at things that make us angry. Let's curate our feed and let's think about adding some breaks- long breaks, little breaks, small breaks, whatever. Just see what happens when we actually just step away from it. Can we spend the whole day away from our phones or baby little steps to get there? And then really, really, I want you to think then, how, how does it make me feel both of those? Curating our feeds and taking a little break. How do we feel? How does it make us feel? Do we want more of that? What could that look like?

That's what we're going to play with this week. I'm going to do the same thing. Social media is a tricky thing. It's a hard thing, especially right now. Especially as we think about our nervous systems. So I invite you to spend a little bit of time reflecting on your habits and what feels good and some changes that you might make that might feel good.

As always, I'm cheering so hard for you. I am so grateful, so, so grateful to Adrienne. She makes my nervous system very calm. I'm grateful to Marzano Resources and to Solution Tree and of course to you this incredible, badass wellness squad. Thank you for being here. Thank you for all that you do, and feel my hand on your back as you move through this week. Make it a great week. I love you.

If this episode resonated with you, find more mental wellness episodes here.