Social media is more like fire, is fire good or is it bad? Well, fire heats our homes, fire cooks our food, and fire even runs our automobiles. But it’s really destructive if it gets outside of the context where it’s useful. If fire gets out of the fireplace, it can burn down the house. If it gets out of the fire pit, you can have a forest fire. So it’s powerful. It’s neither good nor bad.

As we understand the power of social media, we can take some appropriate steps to minimize the downsides and maximize the upsides through our mental health in our relationships. So let’s discuss few tips on how to handle social media!

Tip #1: Schedule a time to check your social media

It can become very consuming if you haven’t allocated a specific time, and I would recommend that you have a start time and an end time so that you can allocate a little chunk of your life to it without getting sucked into it. That’s where some of the negative effects seem to happen.

Tip #2: Remove the push notifications

 In other words, put it into your settings that it doesn’t buzz your phone every time you get a little hit on your social media feed. You want to be in charge of this and not the other way around. You don’t want your social media life to run you, but you take charge of this. So take those push notifications off of your phone and just check it when you’ve scheduled your time to check it.

Tip #3: Consider a media fast

Here’s tip number three, and I really like this one for a lot of reasons. Consider a media fast. What this means is you’re going to set a specific period of time when you will completely abstain from social media. You’ll just stay away from it entirely. You’re not going to check your feed; you’re not going to post anything, you’re not going to like or swipe anything.

A social media fast, especially if you can engage the people you love to do this with you. What if your family, for example, agreed to have a social media fast for 24 hours? What would you do? Could you connect a little more with the people that are around you, in a real life face-to-face sort of a way?

Verdict

I’m not saying that social media is bad. I think as we take intentional control over our use of that social media and we learn things about ourselves when we abstain for a little while from that, it’s going to enhance our experience of it and actually increase the positive benefits to our mental health.