You wake up on Saturday morning, roll over in bed and grab your phone. You open up TikTok and start scrolling. Before you know it, it’s 11:30 am. You’ve been scrolling through social media apps on your phone for a whole hour before even moving your body or taking a sip of water. Sound familiar? This is unfortunately an all too common phenomenon in today’s society. With all of the social media apps and content out there, it’s easy to waste hours every day mindlessly scrolling on your phone. Luckily for you, I’ve put together my top three tips for being more mindful with your social media use.
Limit Your Time Spent On Social Media Apps Every Day
Be honest. How much time are you spending on social media? Many individuals admit they’re spending longer than they’d like to on apps such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. While social media can be useful and allow you to stay up to date, spending too much time on social media has been proven to have many negative effects as well.
It’s important to not let social media get in the way of your real-life obligations such as school, work, relationships, and your overall health and well-being. One way to ensure this doesn’t happen is by managing your screen time on your phone and setting app limits.
Whether you have an Apple product or an Android product, this can be done quite easily and is very useful in limiting your time spent on social media.
Consume And Post Content That Makes You Feel Good
You’re in control of your social media feed. Curate a feed full of content that makes you feel good! As you’re scrolling on social media in the coming days, pay attention to what inspires you and brings you joy, and recognize which content is unhealthy for you to consume right now. Follow and unfollow mindfully.
Another important thing to remember is that you can’t compare your everyday life to someone else’s life online. The majority of people are posting the highlights in their life, not their daily struggles.
When posting content, post for yourself, not for others’ validation. Your worth is not based on the amount of likes, comments, or shares that you receive online. Often on social media “we gravitate to those who impress us, which is why we try to impress people — in the hope they’ll gravitate to us. To impress people, we often change ourselves to make others like us or carefully select what we share to not go against the image we’re trying to portray.” Nick Kossovan, The Hamilton Spectator. Don’t fall into this trap!
Be Intentional With How You’re Using Social Media
An important final step is to take a deeper dive into why you use social media, and what you want to gain from your daily or weekly use on your chosen apps.
Are you looking for educational content to help with college courses? Content to make you laugh after a long day at work? Content that will inspire you to kickstart your journey into a healthier lifestyle? Whatever it may be, drill down on why and how you want to use social media to your advantage.
Remember, it’s okay if not every piece of content that you consume motivates you or inspires you, but with a better understanding of why you’re on social media platforms, it will be easier to not become all-consumed in content that is seemingly useless to your current needs.
Happy Mindful Scrolling!
As you continue to use social media, I urge you to listen to your body and mind. If you’re feeling anxious or stressed, take a minute to check in on yourself and perhaps go for a walk or grab a coffee with a friend before immediately opening up Instagram in an effort to distract yourself.
Social media can have an incredibly positive impact on your life, but it can also bring harmful comparison and add unhealthy stress if used incorrectly. It’s important to put your mental health first and take note of your emotions.
Share your tips below on how you keep a healthy relationship with social media! I’d love to hear your ideas and implement them into my routine. Happy mindful scrolling!
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Say goodbye to mindless scrolling! Here are my top three tips for using social media mindfully: https://bit.ly/3JdaF50 #mindfulness #socialmedia
Do you catch yourself wasting precious hours scrolling on social media? I’m here to help! Here are my top three tips for using social media mindfully: https://bit.ly/3JdaF50
Share your tips below on how you keep a healthy relationship with social media. 👇
Algonquin College Social Media Certificate Program 
Hi Jaiden, I really loved reading your post! You mentioned a lot of great tips, but one of them that spoke out the most to me was posting things that make you feel good. It’s so easy to get caught up in trends and feel that there is an obligation to contribute to the fads, so people will start to post just for views and clicks. I used to do this and then I realized that if I’m not passionate about what I am publishing, why am I doing it in the first place? I started posting about my dogs, food, nature, and much more, and I can 100% say my mental health and emotional health has improved.
Thank you for sharing and I will be looking into the other tips you mentioned such as being mindful of screen time 🙂
I considered writing about a similar topic for my blog as well! It’s very refreshing to see people care about the curation of their timelines. Espeically now a days where follow for follow threads are rampant on most platforms. Taking the time to clean up your follow list and really hone in on those accounts you enjoy interacting with makes a huge difference.
It can be so easy to get overwhelmed when you have so much information at your finger tips, and knowing when to stop & step away is so important.
You’ve done a fantastic job!
Love your Facebook post. I’m definitely in the habit of spending too much of my morning on the internet, thanks for sharing these tips! I’ve definitely noticed that in a world where information is shared in seconds, and bad news spreads like wildfire, more and more people have found themselves doomscrolling. It’s easy to start endlessly scrolling through bad news and scary possibilities. That is definitely a time when remembering your intentions when scrolling would be useful. I will use these to be more mindful in the future!