- Assumptions, envy, mindlessness, comparisons, isolation, inadequacy, guilt, and obligation are at the root of so many of our struggles with social media.
- Many of us spend hours every week on these platforms, and for that reason it’s important that we create a relationship with our social media that we feel benefits and serves us.
- It may seem silly to think about spending time managing your social media, but the fact is you give your time and your attention to these platforms, and they can effect how you feel about yourself and your relationships. What we view on social media impacts us as we go throughout our lives off social media.
- A peaceful relationship with social media is one where you are intentional about which accounts you follow, and one where you give yourself permission to interface with these platforms in a way that works for you, rather than in a way that heightens the problematic dynamics listed in the first bullet point.
- While I’ll get into more specifics in today’s post, the answer to addressing many of these problematic dynamics starts with creating a more mindful and intentional relationship with your social media consumption, and a more accepting relationship with yourself and your limits.
- First, consider why you use social media. When you log in, is it to take a break? Keep in touch with friends? Celebrity gossip? To learn something? Then look at your actual patterns of usage and the accounts you follow to see if they are in line with your intentions for the platform. If not, you’ll need to reconcile the disconnect.
- Next, work to get curious about how social media (and the accounts you follow) impact your mood, energy, feelings about yourself and others, and concentration. For this exercise (and the prior one) to be useful, you will have to accept the conclusions you draw, even if they’re not the conclusions you want.
- Ambivalence – i.e. your conflicting but co-occuring feelings about a topic – is a common factor in a struggle with social media. You can love someone and really dislike how they use these platforms. You can want to learn about a topic and feel overwhelmed with information about it from the account(s) you follow.
- Ultimately, you have to make a decision about which accounts serve you, and how you want to consume them (if at all). For personal relationships, you’ll need to do this in a way that holds respect for the relationships you have with those people off social media as well. This could mean muting rather than unfollowing, or having a kind conversation.
- In this day and age there are many tools to help you moderate your social media consumption including muting accounts you want to keep following (but don’t want to see content from without you deciding when it’s a good time for you to see it) and favoriting accounts that you really value and never want to miss content from.
Social media makes it easy to “fill in the gaps” between what we see and what we don’t with our imagination. Not all of us do this, but when we do, we’re making assumptions, and we can get stuck in traps of envy, comparisons and feelings of inadequacy. We’re more at risk of making assumptions about people or relationships we don’t have direct access to (like celebrities or that high school classmate you don’t actually talk to anymore) because we don’t have actual information (often gathered off social media) about their real lived experiences beyond the picture (aka the positive and negative stuff going on in their life).
Envy, like an assumption, is often more activated when we don’t have a “full sense” of what’s going on in someone’s life. Combine that with how curated social media is, and our envy can run rampant. Envy isn’t necessarily bad (it can help us get in touch with what we want), but it becomes a problem when we’re so fixated on what someone else has that it diminishes our sense of appreciation for what we have. Problematic envy can have a competitive or aggressive element to it (where we want to dominate or take something from someone else).
For many of us, social media is filled with “rules” about when we should post (someone’s birthday? An event?), what the content should be (only happy stuff!), who we should follow (causes you care about? “follow back” / keep following someone?). The challenge with these “rules” is they fill our relationships with social media with obligation and guilt, both of which pull us away from what actually works for us, our limits, and how we want to spend our time.
Even when we follow accounts we “want” to spent our time and attention on, sometimes we’re inundated with information, which can leave us overwhelmed and out of touch with what we actually have capacity for.
There’s not a single solution to managing social media, but any positive relationship with it has to involve being honest with yourself about how it effects you, and setting up your access to it in a way that honors and accepts your limits and priorities.
Comments:
- Today’s post tries and help you think beyond the options of “signing off for good” or just living with social media as is, even though you kind of hate it. For many people, staying away and signing off for good is the right path for them, and that’s great. Today’s post is not meant to discourage leaving social media, it’s meant to help you think through the right path for you.
- I know I am not the first person to tell you that you can unfollow or mute people, many of us hear this all the time, but still struggle in our relationships with social media nonetheless. I think this happens because we aren’t necessarily giving ourselves permission to accept what works for us, and because we feel limited in what our options are (i.e. “it’s awkward if I unfollow, but I don’t want to see this”). Today’s post is aimed to get you thinking about what works for you, and then get you wondering how you can set up your social media to optimize that.
- Managing your social media is not a one-time-event. It’s an ongoing mindfulness exercise where we reflect on what we need, what’s working for us, what’s not working for us, and we make changes accordingly.
- Acceptance (of yourself, of your limits, of what works for you, of your actual usage of social media, of the differences between your actual self and your ideal self etc) is a key part to having a successful relationship with social media.
- I could (and may) do a whole post on assumptions and how they create problems for us. The entire list of issues assumptions create wouldn’t fit in one post, though there is another notable one to consider if you struggle with social media, and that’s that our assumptions can be a sign to us that we’re feeling disconnected from a person we used to feel closer to. When this happens, we can feel isolated.
- James Densley of The Violence Project has a great 10 minute free lecture about social media and how it can effect us. He gave the talk with reference to the links between mass shootings and social media, but much of the content of the talk is applicable beyond violence prevention, and it’s a great sociological perspective on social media and its impact on us.
- If you’re not sure how to “mute” or “favorite” in instagram, do a search online for how to do so on your device. Muting silences an account without unfollowing it, meaning it offers a private way to set a boundary therein limiting what you see (without another person knowing).
- I will likely do a post about curiosity in the future, but in short – curiosity is another one that gets folks in trouble on social media. We can look “it” up, so we do look “it” up, which doesn’t mean it’s in our best interest (or leaves us feeling good) to look “it” up. This can apply to people currently or formerly in our personal lives, celebrities – etc. If you fall into social media rabbit holes you may need to work on challenging / resisting your curiosity.
- If you’re following more accounts than you can keep up with, and that’s stressing you out, you may want to consider the balance between your “Shoulds” and your “Wants”. What you feel pressure to keep up with might be different than what you can keep up with.
- I talk about how envy isn’t necessarily bad. It’s true! We have all of our emotions for a reason.