Taking Steps to improve Mental Health - Cutting down on Social Media

An article written for the Mental Health Month initiative by @naturalmedicine

I recently made a Post, where I was feeling pretty fucking miserable. Without getting too deep into it, there are a range of issues I need to sort out, and one of the biggest problems is time, or the apparent lack of it.

As I get older it is becoming increasingly apparent that the only thing truly valuable is Time. It is finite, and once it is spent on doing an activity you can not get it back. It is prudent therefore to make sure that whatever we decide to do, it should provide some inherent value to us.

One such problem area is Social Media, I can spend hours endlessly flicking through screens and scrolling through feeds... and yet at the end I don't receive any tangible benefit from this. If anything, I often feel worse, partly because everyone seems to have such interesting lives while I'm sat on my fat ass on the sofa.

My reliance on my smart phone doesn't help... I have often found myself mindlessly flicking through, almost like a zombie. Not really engaging, not really interacting... a chance to try and change this negative, wasteful behaviour presented itself last week.

What happened? My old Phone died. Completely, and without warning, it was kaput. Initially this was frustrating, but secretly I was glad as it was at least 6 years old and definitely showing its age. I got this Samsung thing as the reviews weren't bad, and it was one of the cheapest available.

[Money issues still exist, but that's a post for another time]

Anyways, after the last heap of Junk, I was very happy with this shiny new phone. As I was setting it up and looking for apps to download onto it, I realised I had an opportunity to change how I used my phone.

The first thing to change was Instagram. I first joined it about 3 years ago. I always hated it, and hated trying to post to it. Most of the comments were also crap, "great click! DM us to collaborate!" I logged into my account and realised that I hadn't uploaded anything to Instagram in the whole of 2019.

And yet I still flicked through my insta feed a coule of times a week, randomly liking photos. Complete waste of time. I deleted the app off the phone, and then I closed down my account. It was a faff (and had to be done via a desktop), but I managed it (see above image).

It does seem a bit odd, that an app designed to be used on a phone can not be cancelled via the phone.

Annoyingly, I wasn't able to delete the Facebook app off my phone. It appears to almost hardwired into the phone software. I have found an option buried in the settings to disable it so the app doesn't send notifications, or download anything.

The thing is, while I have always detested Instagram, Facebook has always been a useful tool. It helps me connect to people, and its groups are often fantastic to use.

As much as people complain about it, it is not going away anytime soon. It is just far to useful to too many people. As a Portrait Photographer, I use it to network with other clients or models. And as a Wildlife Photographer I use it to connect with the experts of various groups of animals. This is to make sure my pictures are correctly ID'd and the records of the wildlife I see are recorded in the correct place.

With that said... there is a whole lot of guff on facebook.

Stuff like these nametests, or "what colour are you?" or "what sea animal are you?". So many stupid little quizes, and if one of my friends fills one in, it shows it too me! I don't care what your name means!

London Camera Exchange is potentially a useful page, so I elected to 'snooze it' for a month... I may well remove (unfollow) it completely, but for I'll keep it...

Whereas this 'advert' was completely irrelevant so I hid it. I know there are ads on facebook, that is where they make the money. But if I keep seeing shit I get rid of it. The subject was completely irrelevant to me anyway... just wasting my time again.

This post is from a Tourist attraction I visited once 3 years ago. I still regularly see its posts even though I have no interest in it, or even going back and visiting it.

The obvious choice here was to unlike it...

Three hours later, I had sifted through my feed, hiding, snoozing, unliking and in some extreme cases unfriending people. Now on the rare time I log in to the Facebook site, my newsfeed is much shorter, much tighter and has less crap to waste my time with.

Hopefully taking these steps has resulted in making social media a much less overbearing presence, and instead of being a nuisance it has now been turned back into the useful tool it can and should be.

This is just one of the steps I have taken to try to improve my current situation, and drastically cutting back on Social Media gives me more time to spend on more useful areas (such as blogging on Hive 😉)

Thank you for reading, I hope you found it interesting.

If you have any thoughts or opinions on this article then I'd love to see your comments.
And if you really like the content then maybe you would like to upvote or re-hive it.

All Photos taken by @dannewton unless otherwise stated.
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