1. Never start your day with consuming. Before taking in other people’s energy, get your own positive energy flowing whether that be in the form of exercise, meditation, prayer, cooking, walking your dog, talking to your fish, whatever it may be, create a morning ritual that makes YOU feel GOOD and starts your day off on the right foot because I truly believe you dictate your mood for the rest of the day within the first 20 mins.

2. Identify your triggers. If you’re being honest with yourself, you can probably figure out the accounts and people you follow whether they be friends, influencers, celebrities, gossip accounts, that make you feel dark inside. Just unfollow. If something sets you off, remove it from your life. If it’s a friend and you feel bad unfollowing, mute their account.

3. Set time limits. Identify a healthy amount of consumption time for yourself per day and really try to stick to it (your phone actually has a feature where you can limit your own social media consumption time so use it if you must). For me, there’s always a point, when scrolling the gram turns from inspo to dark feelings and questions to myself about why I’m not living up to some imaginary floating standard my brain starts subconsciously constructing from the highlights of that day’s feed. And because of the way IG’s algorithm works now, we’re really only seeing the highlights of the highlights because that’s all they’ll show, just making people’s glory moments seem that much more abundant than they ever seemed in the past.

I really struggle with this as a creator because I hate to think that I’m ever part of the problem or can make people feel this way, and that’s a balance I am constantly looking to find with my own content. I love to post my life highlights too and cute moments of my 2 year old… it may bring joy to some and it may trigger others. Would love your feedback on the type of content I create that makes you feel good and you gain from, and the content that has the opposite effect on you.

4. Stop using social media as a crutch. This is a really bad habit we’ve all gotten into. Not only have we made habits of scrolling social media while we have a spare minute at home on the couch or if you’re like me, when you lock yourself in the bathroom to get a minute away from your toddler, but also when we’re out in public or at a lunch and feel uncomfortable around new people and don’t know what to talk about. It really really limits the possibility of striking up new relationships and just exercising our physical social skills.  We used to have to look up and talk to each other in a bar or at a conference, now it’s easier to just stay in our own little bubbles with all of our “Insta-friends” to keep us warm, but it’s really so incredibly isolating and the effects of that can lead to darker feeling of loneliness over time.

5. Set your own bar. The more you identify for yourself what would make you feel accomplished and fulfilled in life (I like to physically write these down in list form with pen and paper), the easier it will be for you to stay mentally focused on a positive track to those goals, and harder it will be for the dark side of Insta to derail you.  If you don’t know what your life goals and desires are, it’s easy for your brain to get side tracked and tricked into thinking you’re worthless without things you probably wouldn’t have thought twice about otherwise like that new Bottega bag or a trip to Tulum lol.