“A boundary is an imaginary line that separates me from you. It separates your physical space, your feelings, needs and responsibilities from others.” Many people think that boundaries relate to your relationship with others. However, you can put boundaries in place with other things too. For example, putting boundaries in place with social media.
Social media has both pros and cons. However, as we are seeing, social media is having a big impact on young people’s mental health. This includes, having low self-esteem, anxiety, low moods, FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and so much more.
Deleting your social media accounts isn’t always the best choice. Most of the time it is the last resort as there are things you can put in place to help with your mental health without having to delete your social media. So, here are some tips on how to set boundaries with your social media.
Boundaries and why they are important!
🥝 Setting a timer allows you to control how much time you spend on social media. Timers can be set on settings on all accounts. This means that a notification will be shown when the time you have set is up. So make sure when this notification shows up that you stick to it.
🍇 Schedule activities allows you to not have much time to spend on social media since you have put in place other priorities. Overall, scheduling your time allows you to be more productive and achieve more out of your day. However, make sure to not schedule too many things since this may cause burn out so have a couple of days here and there where you have nothing specific planned.
🍓 Control what you see – You can do this by unfollowing or muting accounts that affects you negatively. As well as this, you can put specific words in your social media to filter out any content that you don’t want to see. This allows you to have a more positive feed to uplift your mood. However, make sure that you intake content that have differing opinions than you.
🥥 Decide what you want to get out of social media – Set yourself some goals whilst using social media. Do you want to use social media casually for easy entertainment or do you want to use social media to advocate about something you care about? Or is social media a resource to receive information about world news?
🍅 Turn of your push notifications allows you to not get distracted whilst doing other activities. It also allows you to be in the here and now, especially when you are in the company of other people.
🍍 Let people know that you are spending less time on social media which allows you to feel less pressure in replying to people quickly. As well as allowing people to know not to expect you to like or comment on their posts straight away.
Lessons on self confidence from a teenager!
Overall, boundaries are an important part of life. It allows us to portray what we want, and get people to respect it but sometimes it can be difficult to set them. When there are no boundaries put in place, this could cause people to use you. As well as you not respecting yourself.