How to Keep the Internet from Ruining Your Life When You Can’t Opt Out
I seem to be permanently online lately — I type all day in this hellscape, and I also can not and do not want to abstain from memes. So the past year, I’ve worked on making this a more livable space, one that has actually become a place of refuge instead of a necessary evil of the modern world. Here’s my advice if you’re in a similar predicament.
Stop the morning doomscroll.
One way to feel like shit for the entire day is waking up and immediately scrolling through Twitter or Instagram. My apparently-masochistic self made this mistake today (Monday after the holidays). Everyone was bitching about the Slack outage (which reminded me I have no job lol), or posting their cute little vacation pics from Mexico (I am a sad pasty little creature quarantining in suburban VA at the moment). Now it’s 4 p.m. and I’m still crabby! Something about those first moments of the day is so formative to how our subconscious experiences the rest of it.
Curate (read: cull) social media entities.
Last summer I realized there was a direct correlation between my body dysmorphia and the number of IG influencers I was following. This seems totally obvious! BUT I didn’t even realize how bad my problem was until my mental health…