Hello, hello, my friend. Thank you so much for showing up with me for a few minutes today. Today, we're going to dig into social media use.
Here's the deal. Use and frankly, abuse of social media is rampant right now, and it causes people a lot of stress and can get addictive. I see this all the time in the therapy office, and I don't think it's something that we're talking about enough.
Endless scrolling is unconscious living, my friend, so this episode is designed to help you analyze your own use and regroup if you notice a negative impact. I am going to share some personal takeaways in my own life and what my plan is for my social media use, so hopefully that'll be helpful for you too. Stick around.
Thanks for listening to Take Out Therapy, a podcast for people who are trying to be their best selves, but maybe need a little more information about it all. I'm Rebecca Hunter, a therapist and anxiety specialist doling out the information, latest research, and of course, a little advice here and there. If you've got less than 20 minutes and a good sense of humor, you will find this discussion helpful.
This isn't It's self-help at its finest. Let's get to work. Okay, you guys, so let's get into this.
I was thinking about my own social media use, and here's the deal with me. I use social media for my business and also in my personal life, but there's unintentional bleed there. It wiggles its way into my free time, my bedroom, and sometimes I literally find myself scrolling with no recollection of how I arrived there.
Does this ever happen to you? Hello, this is not good. Looking at unconscious use is a really good place to begin for me, and maybe for you too, because I want to make use of my time, right? I'm trying to like impact the world effectively, and I really don't like getting caught up in any drama or silliness. So if this resonates for you, then hopefully this episode will be helpful today.
Here's something I'll tell you. It's like news, mainstream media news, is an absolute no-go for me due to mental health. Yeah, I'll just be straight up with you.
So when I'm on social media and I'm getting news that's getting filtered through social media, like that's going to work for me either, right? Like people posting articles to this, this, or the other thing. I've decided in my own life that I have to set boundaries around my ingesting of news, whether it be local, national, or world news. Like I have to make that choice.
I have to be in a good mind space to make that choice, and then where I go for my news is really important. Here's the deal. For excellent mental health, we must have excellent boundaries.
That's what I'm talking about. So here's the deal. People use a lot of social media without really realizing the impact that it has on their mental health.
We just don't make the connection. We haven't been taught a ton about it, so it's super understandable. I don't have any judgment about it, but I see it constantly in my office.
People come in for one thing, like anxiety or depression, or they hate their jobs, or their relationships suck, and their use of social media tends to be a pretty big factor in the solutions that are going to be viable for them. Yeah, so this is what makes me kind of a different type of therapist, by the way. Like I'm not sitting in talk therapy.
I'm not listening to people, for example, like drone on about their mother-in-laws, but rather in my work, I help people move towards viable solutions in their lives that are going to vastly improve their mental health. So that's just kind of a little bit more about the work that I do. I've had a lot of ineffective therapists in my time.
Have you? So in terms of social media, what I see is this. I see that social media, when people are overusing it and being really not aware of the impact of that, it can really lend itself to a lack of motivation, which lends itself to a general listlessness, listlessness, an apathy, a meh, you know? This can really get into a disconnected state of being in people's lives, where we just kind of stop doing some of the other things we actually really like to do and find ourselves spending a bunch of time on social media instead. Don't get me started about how worried I am about teenagers right now, but this is like so much more prevalent the younger you are, my friend.
So keep listening, because here's the deal. When we use a lot of social media, disconnection happens. It happens either inside our homes or outside of our homes.
Maybe we start to scroll at work and kind of hate our job, or maybe we scroll at home and get irritated with our family. It's a creeper, man. That's all I'm saying.
It wiggles its way into the tiny corners of our lives without us knowing about it. So I just want to bring it up, because I think it's just important for us to be conscious about how our social media impacts our lives. As a therapist with literally no amount of study about this, although trainings are including social media interventions constantly, so you know that means something, I'm just saying I haven't looked up all the research, the current research.
I would definitely say, though, that social media use can be a really big factor. In depression, which we should call disconnection, because depression is disconnection from ourself and others, it's a big factor in people that are stressed out or overwhelmed. People with anxiety, absolutely, social media use can be a really big factor there, and totally in burnout as well.
It's a way that we are able to avoid or escape what's actually happening in our lives, and also use it for the things that we really like it for, but it's not always based in choice, but rather an automatic behavior or something that we do out of boredom. So overuse of social media isn't exactly helping with feelings of isolation, my friend, which a lot of people are dealing with right now, not to mention it's completely mistraining our brain to respond to adrenaline and dopamine-based cues, and I'll get into that a little bit more. There's also the constant nervous system activation, which is kind of what I'm talking about with the dopamine and the adrenaline, that can happen with a lot of social media use, which can lead to an anxiety problem, which can lead to panic, absolutely, and you know what I have to say about that.
Anxiety is a solvable problem. Are you a business owner who struggles to stay emotionally balanced? I feel you, my friend. Lots of people I work with are trying to create the life of their dreams, but get lost in the shuffle of it all.
Stress, overwhelm, and anxiety can run our lives and ruin our plans. If you'd like to level up your emotional life and get some traction to reach your goals, Back to Calm, my online anxiety recovery program, might be a perfect fit for you. This fully online course will guide you gently through the process of getting back to a better place in your life without the stress, overwhelm, and anxiety.
With some science, real-world usable solutions from the therapy office, and lots of humor, I can help you get into a better relationship with yourself, be able to show up in your life, and do what you want to do, whether that's go to Target or start your million-dollar empire, my friend. Anxiety stops us from living, and I can help. Find out if Back to Calm feels right for you at rebeccahuntermsw.com. Of course, there's a link in the show notes.
So why the heck, if social media is damaging and it causes such negative mental health impacts, do we even bother with it? Well, you guys, it's awesome. Social media is amazing, and it has a ton of potential to impact our lives positively, too. We use social media to connect with people, whether it be for business reasons, because I know a lot of you are business owners and have little or big businesses.
Social media is also a great place to get information and to learn about stuff. But here's the deal. We endlessly scroll for completely other reasons that have nothing to do with any of the good things, right? Why we scroll is a little bit complicated, so I'm going to break it down for you in two ways, mental and physical.
Mentally, emotionally, we want to connect. We're human beings. We need to have love and belonging and connection and feel like we're part of the whole.
That's part of just being a human. We want to feel part of something. We like to know what's happening, right? That's a brain-based thing and also a human-based thing.
We're very cultured to give a shit about what's happening out there, so we get on social media and we normalize our experience, right? We look for ways people are like us so we can feel better about what we've got going on, or we look for ways to improve it, improve our lives, or we fall into a pity party and all the things we're not actually doing in our lives that it seems like everybody else is doing, of course. So there's physical impacts as well. The chemical hits that we get from the emotions is one part, okay? When you have big emotions, the physical body follows suit.
So yeah, there's dopamine and adrenaline and then we got to get the cortisol and all the things. It's a lot for our little bodies to handle based on something that's not actually happening in our real life. I hope that makes sense to you when I say that, because yes, it is actually happening, but it's not actually happening to us and we're exposing our bodies to a lot of different things for it to handle on a fairly continuous basis.
And then, you know, we could go all day about the genius behind social media. It's absolutely fascinating. These people have figured out how to make us click more, spend more time, spend more energy, and scroll, scroll, scroll.
There is beautiful, amazing, super interesting science behind it, my friend, you know? And if we think that we have choices, I just have to laugh at that sometimes. So can we just agree that social media is designed to capture and hold our attention? It's not you, my friend. It's them, the evil creators.
No, I love social media. I'm totally in support of social media. I think we need to live consciously about it.
So what can we do about it? Okay, the first step is make yourself some rules, my friend. You need to have boundaries and guidelines to live your life. So make yourself some rules.
This is about your relationship with yourself and creating structure that your brain can adhere to with your buy-in. It's about you. How do you know your own rules? Well, first, you need to observe what's happening and then identify needed change, okay? So closely monitor your time.
I used to work with teens in juvenile justice. And kids are so funny. You know, they do all kinds of things that are so inappropriate.
And so we used to teach them this concept of time, place, and manner, right? Like, is this an appropriate time to be using social media? Where are you and who is there with you, right? And manner is just sort of like, and how are you emotionally right now? And is this an appropriate use of this, you know, emotional state? Or is it going to be helpful, kind of, right? So are you alone? Are you at work? Are you with people? Figure out what you're doing on social media in the first place. Like, just pause when you notice that you're using social media and just make sure you keep it top of mind as you go. So what I mean by this is like, why are you there, my friend? What is your why? I'll talk about my why in a second to help you kind of narrow this down.
And then once you see sort of like, okay, this is what I think about my use. How much time am I spending? Where am I using it? Who am I with and what's going on when I'm using it? Where am I at emotionally? And you decide like, well, these are the reasons why I want to use social media, then you got to monitor your feed, clean that thing up on every single social media channel you're using my friend, diversify your feed, right? Meaning see different opinions from yourself if you feel like that's in your value system. But definitely change some things, okay? Minimize the negative impacts of people and businesses and things that take up space in your feed, right? And just choose, choose, choose.
So when you notice that you're unconsciously scrolling, what I would say is a very smart intervention is just to get distance from it, meaning put your phone down and go get a drink of water or go to the restroom and choose when you'll come back again. Meaning if you are sitting there on your couch and you're like, I'm going to read my book and then all of a sudden you find yourself on social media, just put the phone down, get a little bit of space from it and then just choose what you're going to do next. Are you going to go back to reading your book or are you having fun and it feels like a positive interaction on social media, time, place and manner, remembering your why, okay? So the other thing I would say is like, hey friend, there's people in your life that notice your social media use, so ask for some feedback, okay? Conversation holds value in relationships, meaning if the people in your life feel like you're scrolling social media too much and they haven't said it to you and you ask them for feedback and that's what you get, say thank you because they're showing up in the relationship and telling you how it is for them, right? Ask for feedback about your social media use.
What could you possibly have to lose except for getting your feelings hurt, which you can recover from. Say it out loud. Say your why out loud.
Say what you think of your own social media use out loud to yourself and others. Make this conversation that I'm having with you today part of your conversation that you have in your life, okay? So here's my deal. I use social media for three whys, three reasons.
I like to connect with old friends strictly for entertainment and for my business, okay? Anything else is a no-go and I need to tighten my rules about what constitutes entertainment and how much time, like specifically minutes, measurable always when you're coming up with rules and goals, like how much time per day would I like to entertain myself here, okay? So it's important. The entertainment piece can have a little bit of a bleed there, right? It kind of wiggles its way in, like well this is entertaining, well this news is entertaining, or this ranty person, or this comment thread, oh my goodness. Yes, entertaining.
Constructive? Maybe not. So that's where the choice comes in. For my business, I schedule all my social media for my business.
So what does that mean? It's totally written. Everything I have, everything I put out on social media is absolutely written and created by me only. I'm a one woman show over here.
But it all self-posts. It's all scheduled on a piece of software to keep a nice flow of things. Don't forget, my friend, that social media is a business.
And as a business owner, both for my private practice and, you know, I have got my online anxiety recovery program, that's marketing, right? No one can find out that I can help them unless they can find me. And it's made a huge difference in my business and I'm super grateful about it. But it can't be, like I can't be on social media all the time trying to figure out what I'm going to post.
I spend about one hour doing all my posts a week and then everything just rolls along. So hopefully if you're a business owner, you're scheduling your social media because that's a huge trap that business people can get into that takes their businesses down. It causes a lot of anxiety.
I use Meet Edgar and it's awesome. I engage on social media for my business during the week, during business hours, boundaries, people gotta have them. For my own life, I just poke in and out whenever I feel like it and that's where I'm feeling like things really have to tighten up.
So I also keep a really tight feed. I look at food, business related stuff, and my friends. I love me some food.
What do you think? Yeah, I should definitely keep looking at food. My recipe collection's getting bigger and bigger. I totally get rid of people that get on my nerves.
Remember my friend, you have a choice. You have access to tons of annoying people in real life. There will be no loss, I promise.
Get rid of annoying people on social media. Don't put yourself through that. For my own personal entertainment, I've got to cut back because it does put me in this catatonic, unmotivated, and quite lazy state.
Some of this, again, is mental and some is physical. So that's getting trimmed back for me considerably. I have other things I want to do with that time like read a book or absolutely freaking nothing at all.
Laying in my hammock is becoming a favorite activity. So how will changing your use of social media impact your life? Well, here's the deal. When you pull away a little bit from social media, you're going to experience change.
I can pretty much guarantee that. So what the change is, is totally what you do with it. You're going to find yourself with more time for other, more interesting, real, fulfilling activities and conversations, interactions, which frankly can be a little bit uncomfortable, right? So don't forget we were scrolling for a reason, whether it was conscious or unconscious, like whatever.
How you deal with boredom matters, my friend. But letting go of some of the social media interaction is going to give you some openings to explore some other areas of your life. So how about a little more connection? There's nothing lonelier than being in a room with someone on their cell phone.
Am I right? It feels like, hello, the most interesting person is right here on the couch with you. Yeah, I can't stand that. Reduction of social media is going to get important for raising kids.
It's becoming part of the conversation, to be honest, in my field. We need to get conscious about what we're modeling for kids. What are we showing our kids about connection and interaction with our like completely unconscious social media use? Believe me, kids notice everything.
So it is worthy of just like noticing and figuring out those things that we talked about. The why and how much time and when and where and how you're going to use social media. That's just really going to help.
The other thing is I know a lot of you are leaders. We use social media for business. When we really take a look at how we're doing that, we can see that when we reduce social media use, more gets done.
It feels so much more productive at work. Like if I'm in my office and I'm not sitting on my lovely porch like I like to, I may as well get shit done, right? Yes. So not to mention that less scroll is less overwhelmed.
So just generally freeing up the brain to be creative and naturally inspired and to just think less about all the things that we see on social media will help your brain just chill out. So hopefully that's really helpful. My goal, and I hope that your goal too, is to live a conscious life.
Because when we show up in our lives in a conscious way, not mindless scrolling, we can really have more joy and ease and our mental health is just going to be better. So what's the goal, right? The goal of this podcast is to help you improve your mental health. I love social media, but it has a place in my life and it gets a tiny piece of my life and my existence.
My plans for my life and frankly, my values in this journey are all about living consciously, showing up in a way that exudes choice and empowerment. When I get into scrolling endlessly on social media, it just feels bad. It feels overwhelming and the world seems super scary and my nervous system is shot for the day.
And I'm back to coping. Like forget it. I've worked so hard to heal from my past and my anxiety and all the challenges along the way.
I'm not making any compromises, my friend. Period. And this is my life and you shouldn't compromise either.
Let's live this thing with choice about how we spend our time and energy. Okay? Thanks for hanging out today. I'll be back in a couple of weeks.
I'm off to the woods. Yeehaw! I love it. I love, love, love going camping.
And guess what? I'm going fishing. Hopefully I don't actually catch anything this year because that's the part I have not quite mastered. What to do with a fish on a hook.
Stay tuned, folks. This is exciting stuff. Thanks for showing up.
Okay, I hope you found today's episode helpful. Here's the deal. I'd like to get rid of some of the stigma around mental health and this is how I'm You can join me by leaving a review, sending an episode along to a struggling friend, or even subscribing.
Any of those choices would be so exciting, my friend, because then you and I, we would be helping more people. Let's do that. If you want to work with me, visit me at rebeccahuntermsw.com and you can see all the fun things I'm up to.
Don't forget, I'm an anxiety specialist, so if that's your jam, it's my jam too. Way to show up today.
