Supportive social media use “looks like meaningful connections.” “So it's not so other-focused, or it's not so comparison-focused and it's not so wallowing-focused but it's more support-generative,” she says. Social media can also facilitate asking for supportive feedback from a community when something doesn’t go how we hoped it would. Go beyond liking posts and reacting with emojis, she said, and cultivate connections with people you know or would like to know better. Choose your follows carefully.įirst and foremost, supportive social media use “looks like meaningful connections,” says Danielle Ramo, PhD, clinical psychologist and senior director of research at Hopelab, a social innovation lab that builds behavior change tech to support teen and young adult health and wellbeing. Much of this advice works for teens and tweens, as well as adults. Luckily for us all, It turns out there are evidence-based strategies for using social media and digital devices in ways that are supportive of mental health and wellbeing. Watching mundane 10-second videos of their kids, their baking, and their house projects has been a ballast of normalcy in a tumultuous time.Īs we close in on a year of lockdowns and social distancing - and since I know I’m still going to be indulging in regular scrolling bursts while hiding from my children - I decided to see if I could make Instagram a better place to be. Instagram, for all its problems with vaccine misinformation and other conspiracy theories, has been a surprising lifeline this year while I’ve been cut off from the people I love - or even merely like. Facebook was a garbage fire of misinformation long before the pandemic it's also the place where I got information from my neighbors and the local school PTA. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with social media for years. This isn’t an earth-shattering revelation, to be sure, but in the Before Times I had friends to hang out with and now I only have their Instagram Stories to watch. If 2020 has taught me anything, it’s that I have a bottomless appetite for doomscrolling and that Instagram can make me feel both better and worse in the same session.
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