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Protecting Your Peace: 5 Strategies to Set Social Media Boundaries

June 16, 2022

Setting healthy boundaries is not only essential to our relationships. When it comes to our online lives, creating clear-cut borders is also a must. These margins are crucial because aside from helping us with our emotional health, they also allow us to be more focused in juggling the more important things like our jobs, studies and relationships.

This is not about spreading hate about social media platforms, however. In fact, I would say it is not scrolling through your feeds that is unhealthy but our lack of boundaries.

So whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat, here are five strategies on how to set healthy boundaries.

 

1. Make Sunday screen-free.

 

Not just your smartphone. Be it your tablet, laptop, computer or TV, take a day off. It doesn’t need to be a Sunday. If you have work during weekends, do it on Thursday or Friday — whatever day of the week works for you.

We check our gadgets a ridiculous amount of time, that the flood of information overwhelms and drains us. Give up a day on social media to just read a book, spend time with family or be with nature. A single day in a week should be doable!

 

2. Ditch your phone before bed.

 

If an entire day seems impossible, try just the evening. Blue light emitted by electronic gadgets can suppress the body’s release of melatonin, a hormone that makes you feel drowsy. This can affect your circadian rhythm and hurt your sleep.

Decrease the amount of light you’re taking in with your eyes and tuck away your phone at night. A good rule of thumb is an hour or two before bedtime.

 

3. Go through your following list and do a purge.

 

Maybe you started to follow certain people for fitness inspiration, OOTDs or travel aesthetics but recently it started to cross the lines and inflated your insecurity. It’s easy to fall down in a comparison spiral in social media and feel inadequate or not good enough. If you feel like this is the case, then it could be a good idea to remove certain accounts in your following list.

Remember that you don’t need to know what everyone else is doing, especially if it’s negatively affecting you or it isn’t just benefiting you.

 

4. Keep your phone on silent mode when with friends or family.

 

Phone use can hurt social interactions and kill conversations. To eliminate distractions that keep you from being present in group settings, turn your phone upside down or put it in your pocket and switch it on silent mode. If you can, you can also turn it on airplane mode to make sure you don’t hear dings and see alerts, messages and other notifications during dates, meetings and meals. .

 

5. Set daily app usage limits on your phone.

 

If you want to manage social media consumption more proactively and get your digital life under control, you can make use of certain features  on your smartphone.

The in-built “Screen Time” feature on iOS, for example, allows you to limit the time you spend on specified apps. Once the limit has been reached, a reminder notification will be sent to you. You can technically still use the app and ignore the alerts but it will help you manage your time better and be accountable with your boundaries.

 

 

 

 

In this digital era, it can be difficult to create new habits for social media-free breaks and pauses. Nonetheless, if you are truly committed to setting healthy boundaries and making positive changes in your wellbeing, take a chance and try these strategies!

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