It’s January and your New Year’s Resolution is to give up social media entirely. You spend one day feeling virtuous, then a few more days feeling anxious as you wonder what you’re missing out on. By the end of the first week, you’ve caved, reinstalled all the apps on your phone, and spent hours binging on Facebook and Instagram.
Spending too much time on social media isn’t healthy, but you don’t have to give it up entirely. If you’re worried that your virtual life has overtaken your real life, try going on a social media diet instead. When you go on a food diet to lose weight, you don’t stop eating completely. You eat less, choosing healthy foods over unhealthy ones. In the same way, making healthy social media choices can improve your mental health and your relationships with those around you.
Timeblocking is one way to keep social media from eating up your time. Timeblocking is a time management technique where you decide how much time you’re going to allocate to an activity and what goal you want to achieve in that time. Once the time is up, you stop. For example, you might decide that you want to spend 30 minutes a day on Instagram with the goal of keeping up with your friends and sharing your pictures. You can use your phone’s timer to keep you honest. There are also timeblocking apps you can put on your phone if you want to be really organized.
One benefit of limiting the time you spend on the activities that normally take hours out of your day is that it makes you focus on what matters. Instead of scrolling mindlessly, you’re looking for the content that has value to you — it brings you joy, informs you, or otherwise enriches your life. I spend a lot of time on Facebook because it’s part of my job, but I still allocate a little bit of personal Facebook time every day too. For me, seeing family pictures and following local news and events are what’s important. I’m happier knowing what’s going on with places and people that matter to me, and not seeing angry memes.
Another healthy way to use social media is to incorporate it into your health and fitness goals for the new year. The Fitbit app lets you “race” your friends to see who can get the most steps each week. I find it motivating to know that my friends are trying — sometimes succeeding, sometimes not — just as hard as I am to make time for exercise in their day. Most other popular fitness apps also have a social media component. Having an accountability partner is one of the best ways to make sure you stick with a diet or exercise plan. If you get a partner or a small group together on the same app, everyone’s chance of success increases.
Social media is all around us. So this year, resolve to make it a healthy part of your life.
