#DEMentalHealthMondays – Social Media Breaks

Hey everyone!
We are back with another post for #DEMentalHealthMondays segment!
For today’s topic, we are going to touch on social media breaks and their importance in this technology based world we are currently living in. As you may already know and have read if you’re subscribed to DE, we post about mental health on Mondays of the week to shed light and bring awareness to a growing epidemic of mental health related problems or issues specifically in the African American community. Lets get into our topic for today below.

Social Media breaks are necessary right now and should be a requirement for those who are online and participating in social media.

Back in the day, you could go online and post here and there. Laugh a bit, connect with friends and family, and build new connections so calmly and peacefully. There weren’t any ads to sell things or products being shoved in your face to buy. Just pure communication and connections.

Now, we are witnessing just a pure overload of information on a regular and consistent basis. This overload can cause a mental problem if you are not careful and do not regulate how much you take in mentally from online content.

Ways to Take a Break:

Don’t log onto social media first thing in the morning each day. Start your day on a better note. You can journal, you can meditate, you can workout, even clean your home. Find another way of starting your day other than making social media the first priority.
Set a timer to limit how much time you are on social media. Do not just spend all day scrolling for hours on end on social media. The more you scroll, the more you are going to take in mentally whether it be positive or negative, and in this day and age, 9 times out of 10 it’s more negative content being pushed onto you when you continuously scroll than positive.
Post more than you scroll. This is significantly important if you are a Content Creator, an Entrepreneur, and/or a Business Owner. If you are posting more positive things than taking in more negative things then you are doing two things here: you are providing better content for others for one because like I said before there is a lot of negative content online right now, and you are protecting your mental state of mind by focusing on better things that you should be focusing on anyways. Now this ties into taking a break from social media because once you post you are going to log off and allow your posts to do their thing. You are not going to post and then begin just scrolling endlessly. Post and go.
Set a schedule. Schedule out your times online throughout each day, each week, and each month. For example, you can only schedule to be on social media Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays of each week leaving Tuesday, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays to focus on other things offline in reality. You can even schedule to only be online for two days out of the week if needed. By limiting how many days you are online, you have the ability to control how much content you ingest for yourself mentally.

These are just some ways that you can take a break from social media but you do what is best for you. If you need to disconnect or deactivate your pages for a short amount of time because you just can not stop logging on, do that. Do what helps your mental health but do not allow social media and the content being posted constantly to control your mental state of mind for the bad.

How do you make sure that you keep a level head mentally and keep your mental health positive and strong daily as a participant of Social Media?
Leave your thoughts & comments in the comment section below.

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