16 Apr It Was Time to Clean Up My Social Media Feed. This is What I did.
Social media feeds matter
Your phone is probably the single biggest influence on your mood, behavior, and thoughts nowadays. You carry it with you everywhere, from the office to the toilet (God forbid going one session without scrolling!).
Because our screen time has ballooned in the last few years, and especially in the last few weeks, it’s pivotal to be mindful of the media we’re consuming each day.
There’s no magic formula for determining what’s good or bad in your feed, but it’s useful to take some time to audit your content to make sure it fits your goals.
What you see in your social feed has the power to help or hurt your ambitions, so choose your follows wisely and fill your feed with inspirational content.
I used to follow countless influencers that fed me toxic and frivolous content that did nothing but make me feel unsuccessful. I used to compare my 24/7 with their 5 minutes of photoshopped perfection. For example, I used to obsess over fitness, so I kept my feed chock-full with health gurus preaching different diets and lifestyles I couldn’t afford or sustain in a 9-to-5 job. It just wasn’t possible.
I also used to keep up with celebrity stories and pictures, living their life through a like, comment, or a simple scroll. I gawked at Kylie Jenner’s lavish lifestyle, Victoria Secret Angels’ “what I eat in a day” stories, and relatable memes mostly about being sloppy, drinking too much, or sleeping. Throw in some seemingly more successful peers filling my feed with travel stories and parties, and it was the perfect cocktail for FOMO.
The moment I finished scrolling or reached my 50 minutes a day on Instagram (why did I set up that alert?) I felt so much worse than before I opened the app. Wasn’t I supposed to be inspired?
One day, I sat down and decided I had enough. I opened Instagram and began cleaning up my feed. It was time.
Mute accounts that make you feel bad
It may be socially unacceptable to unfollow someone you know, but it may be a better decision than you think.
If you want to fill your social feed with positive vibes, learn to distinguish and eradicate accounts that bring out feelings of envy, disappointment, frustration, and so forth. If you have a friend that regularly angers you with controversial posts or sparks resentment with heavily filtered travel pictures, unfollow them. Honestly, you won’t miss them.
Keep the accounts that spark joy, feed inspiration, and reflect your values. Be highly deliberate with the information you’re exposed to.
If you’re really not keen on unfollowing or feel obliged to stay connected to a certain person, then you can simply “mute” their posts and stories. The moment you mute, content published by those accounts won’t show up on your feed or on the platform’s stories ribbon on the top. On Facebook, you can do the same by hovering over the three dots on the right-hand corner of a post and clicking on “unfollow [name]”.
Unfriend or block bad influences
Sometimes unfollowing or muting is not enough, so the next step is to unfriend or block.
When someone is toxic with their posts or presence on your feed, it’s time to check-in to a temporary rehab from that person, by blocking them. We could apply this to an ex you continuously stalk after a breakup, or a friend who did you wrong. Between 40-60% of people in Europe and the United States check their exes’ profiles each month. So get rid of ’em, you don’t need that.
After a breakup, it’s important to cut off any type of contact to allow your heart to heal. But if you’re constantly faced with their updates, it will take much longer to get over them.
Audit all the pages you follow
Go through all the pages you follow or like, unfollowing those that don’t add any value to your life. You’ll find that you’re following lots of accounts and pages you followed impulsively, but don’t actually bring you any benefit.
This is time-consuming work, but so is deep cleaning. You’ll be happy after it’s over, and if you catch an account that escaped your wrath, make sure to unfollow it on the spot.
Add positive influences to your feed
Now that you’ve caught and unfollowed most of your useless or toxic connections, replace them with those that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. You deserve nothing less than accounts that will positively impact your day.
The options are endless and customizable. You could add a healthy cooking page, an unbiased news source, local NGOs, a makeup artist that inspires you, or a comedian that cracks you up.
Once you deliberately reconstruct your feed to feature wholesome content, your experience will be much more pleasant and less addictive. You’ll walk away feeling more connected to the people and causes you feel most strongly about.
Don’t compare yourself to artificiality
Hear-ye hear-ye, most of what you see on social media isn’t real.
Be mindful of how much social media impacts your life, and start your purge by eradicating the notion that what you see online is real. We’re so over-stimulated by too much information, negative posts, and unrealistic comparisons that we’ve lost track of reality. The more time we spend on social media, the more we’re likely to experience depression and anxiety, mostly due to our viewing habits.
Most social media users want to project a better version of themselves online, often through heavy editing and Photoshop filters. This means that what we’re seeing through our screens isn’t an accurate representation of reality. You may already know of this stuff, but it still takes a hefty mental effort to stop comparing your life with someone’s best 5 minutes of their day.
So be mindful of what you’re scrolling through and don’t juxtapose what you see online with what’s above your phone screen. No matter our situations, no one’s life is perfect and everyone’s experiences are unique.
Conclusion
Social media may have its caveats, but it’s an exceptional resource to stay connected with people across the world and through which to express yourself. Still, you should be mindful of its powerful effects on your mental health and learn to take control of its leverage.
Cleaning up your social feed and being diligent about picking which accounts to follow will ensure that your experience with social media will be as positive as possible.