Detoxing From Social Media

Social media can be a great tool for staying connected with friends and family, but there can be a lot of negativity online, affecting our moods. Sometimes it can be good to detox from certain parts of social media to ensure we’re not becoming overloaded with sadness, anger, or pessimism.

Time Limits

You can use built-in settings on your phone to set time limits for certain apps, for example, I have a time limit of 1 hour for TikTok to avoid doom scrolling if I’m bored. This can be a great tactic if you spend too much time online or on your phone, giving you a reminder to take a break and locking the app so you cannot access it.

Staying Away From Your Phone

Another way to limit your time on social media is to do things that take you away from your phone. For example, you could find hobbies that you already like or want to pick up and schedule some time in your day to do them with your phone set aside. I like to do sewing when I need time away from social media because it uses both my hands and I can’t just keep picking up my phone to check it. You can also have the TV on in the background for noise if the silence bothers you.

Deleting Apps

Possibly one of the most drastic ways to stay away from social media is to delete the apps causing you issues. If you use Facebook mostly to talk to people but find yourself getting caught up in your news feed, delete the Facebook app and keep the Messenger app. If you just want to take a short break, set a time limit of a week or a month and allow yourself to re-download it after, you might even find you don’t want to when the time is up!

Algorithms

If you’re getting fed up with the types of posts you’re seeing on your feeds, or maybe you’re finding the posts are upsetting or angering, try to influence your algorithm by indicating that you want to see less of those kinds of posts, and follow more positive and lighthearted accounts. I like to do this by interacting with cute animal videos and purposefully not interacting with clickbait and ‘rage bait’, I’ve found that by doing this my feed is a lot less annoying and I get to focus on the things I like.