Social media is the epitome of a love-hate relationship: we love spending time with it, but we know it’s not always what’s best for us and our mental health. It’s safe to say nobody’s perfect, so we all have social media habits we know aren’t good for us, such as these four habits that you should slowly step away from.
1. Creeping on your exes
Let’s be real here: we all do it. Social media makes it easier than ever to low-key creep on your exes and see what they’re up to now. But we know it’s probably not the best for our mental and emotional health when we do this. It’s one of the habits Madeline McInnis, a senior at Wilfrid Laurier University, is trying to break.
“This is something I'm still working on, but all it does is make me competitive and feel like I'm not doing enough with my life,” she says. “Eventually, I just unfollow all of the [exes] that really bothered me, and it was hard at first, but it mostly worked. The only thing is when my friends post things with my exes in them — I always end up creeping anyway! Because of this, I've started a cute tally in my journal for ‘it's been [tally] days since you last went to their profiles.’ It's silly, but knowing I'm accountable keeps my mental health in check!”
Why didn’t we come up with the idea of keeping track in a journal of how many days you’ve gone since doing this or any other social media bad habit!
2. Checking social media first thing in the morning or right before bed
Most of us are in the habit of doing one (or both) of these things. But that doesn’t mean we should be doing it. Megan Mann, a graduate of Purdue, says her bad social media habit is checking social media within the first hour she’s up or the hour before she goes to bed.
“It makes it so easy for you to start your day in a bad place or end it sourly,” she says. Plus, staring at your phone screen could be contributing to why you’re having a tough time sleeping at night, according to Business Insider. Sounds like it’s time to dive into that book we’ve been meaning to read!
Related: How to Break Your Phone Addiction
3. Pulling up social media with or without notifications
Just tapping on the apps themselves is a bad habit because it can be so mindless, whether you have your notifications turned on or off. Savannah Seymour, a senior at Eastern Florida State, says she felt obligated to check her notifications as soon as she saw them.
“I turned push notifications off for all social media apps, and it helped my time management tremendously,” she says. “Now, I only see notifications in the periods I open the apps, which I've found reduces distraction and helps you limit the number of times you're opening social media!”
On the other hand, Mariana Huben, a senior at the University of California, Davis, says she has the opposite problem of opening her social media apps even when there isn’t a notification.
“It almost always makes me waste time scrolling endlessly through posts that I don't care about, she says. “I realized that consuming so much social media was affecting my self-esteem by making me feel like a loser when other people were out having fun. I ended up deleting my Snapchat account altogether and just deleting the other apps off my phone so I couldn't check the accounts unless I was on a computer. Doing that really helped improve my productivity and it gave me a chance to just take a deep breath and enjoy the life I'm living.”
Whichever problem you might have, there is a luckily a good solution for both.
4. Aimlessly spending time on social media
Similar to what Mariana said before, it’s way too easy to end up killing a ton of time just scrolling through social media. This is a bad habit that Makena Gera, a sophomore at Marist College, says she has, particularly on Instagram’s suggest page.
“Everyone says they spend too much time on social media, but the fact that the suggested page is tailored to show more of what I'm interested in just makes it that much harder to stop scrolling,” she says. “While most of the posts I like are food videos and style inspiration pictures, my endless scrolling leaves me feeling bad about myself (and also really hungry). I'm trying to break it by limiting the amount of time I spend on Instagram every day, but it's definitely really tough.” She’s not wrong about that.
Breaking bad social media habits is super hard, especially because it’s how we keep in touch with our section of the world, along with the world at large. But it’s totally worth it to rein in your social media habits so you’re not engaging with all that information (which can really wear on your mental health) all hours of the day. Plus, it gives you more time to do the things you truly love, like spending time with your friends, calling your mom or indulging in some quality me-time.