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by Moderator ★

Who Do You Interact with on Social Media?

February 11, 2021 in Social Media Guide

Obviously, social media is a form of communication. However, compared to our offline lives, where we’re likely not talking to more than a few people at a time, being on social media can feel like yelling out to the whole entire world, where your words can be seen by anyone, everyone, and with many of whom have the ability to respond.

Of course, this isn’t the case for everyone, depending on which platform you’re using, whether you’re public or private, or if you have selected lists of friends who can view your content. These tactics are all ideal ways to have as much of a positive social media experience as possible, but we want to take a step back for those accounts and times that you want to speak on a more public platform.

For those with more public accounts, it’s easy to engage with, well, everyone. You may find yourself in the comment section of TikToks or YouTube, or in the replies of Twitter threads or popular Instagram posts. You may even be initiating the public discussion by tweeting on your public account or putting up a discussion question on an Instagram story.

Social media can be a great outlet for those with social anxiety, giving those with it a space to talk more candidly and without worry about things like interpreting people’s reactions in real time. However, while public accounts can be beneficial to meet others without the pressure of having to respond right away or worrying that they’re judging you in that moment, it can also be harmful, because it can make you vulnerable to hate and troll comments, as well as tempting you to respond to hate comments on other people’s posts. The more you engage with negative interactions online, the more likely you are to feel anxious about how these interactions go, and you may end up internalizing some of the hurtful things that are said towards you, even by complete strangers.

Regardless if you have private or public accounts, you should have the intent of interacting with those that you feel like would give you a more positive experience. While it may be tempting to bite back against a rude comment on a YouTube video, consider leaving a message of support instead for the person who originally posted the video. If someone you know is leaving hateful content on your FaceBook feed, but you don’t know them too well, instead of responding, you can mute or block them. 

Social media interactions aren’t always going to be perfect, happy, or positive, but if you can take control over what you can to avoid the negative people instead of engaging with them, you’re likely to feel less anxiety about logging on and the content you’re putting up and interacting with.

Do you prefer to have public social media accounts, or do you have more locked/private ones? Who do you usually talk to on social media? If you’ve interacted with people who aren’t a part of your offline life, what have those interactions been like?

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Black Girls Smile

February 5, 2021 in LINKS

Icon Credit: Black Girls Smile

Mental health and wellbeing are universally important, but African-American girls can face unique circumstances that result in increased vulnerability to certain mental health difficulties. With this in mind, Lauren Carson created a national non-profit organization in 2008 called Black Girls Smile to promote positive mental health and educational opportunities for these girls and those who care for them.

BGS offers workshops on topics ranging from healthy relationships to positive self-image/body-image and emotional regulation to college prep. Their website gives the option to request workshops and programs for your school or group. The organization is even running a monthly Zoom book club!

A really special aspect of support given by BGS is the Charlyne McFarland Therapy Scholarship. This scholarship provides African American young women with financial support for therapy with a licensed mental health professional with unique sensitivity to race and culture. Check out the interest form for the scholarship here!

Mental health resources are not one-size-fits-all and bringing attention to the needs of marginalized groups is always a worthwhile cause.

What identities or aspects about yourself do you feel are impacted severely by your mental health difficulties?

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Being Only Human

February 1, 2021 in Be Positive

Almost anything can affect us negatively. Pretty much anything can affect us to an extreme degree, even if we don’t expect it to. It can be the major, like aspects of a relationship (friend, family, romantic, or others) that hurt you, to what feels like the minor, like unpredictable changes in routine. 

Over the years, you may have been able to pinpoint exactly what it is that triggers or upsets you, have likely developed some sort of skill to help you manage the negative emotions tied to that instance. If your sibling makes fun of you, you may have learned to laugh it off and play along instead of letting it get to you. If you take unexpected changes in your routine really poorly, you may have come up with ways to adjust and become more flexible. 

However, sometimes you may find yourself reacting the way you used to before developing these coping mechanisms, and that can lead to a whole other level of bad feelings.

Let’s take a bad grade, for example. Say you didn’t do well on a paper, and you find yourself experiencing depressive symptoms, and overall just feeling really bad about yourself. You find yourself blaming yourself for not starting earlier, or not doing one more readthrough before submitting, or get upset at yourself for messing up in a class that otherwise has gone well for you.

And when these self-blaming thoughts begin to happen, you then find yourself getting angry at yourself too. This isn’t the first bad grade that you’ve gotten, so why are you taking it so hard now? You’ve taken other bad grades really well before, and know that you’ll survive this one too, so why are you experiencing these feelings that you know are tied to your depression or anxiety? It’s easy to slip into these thoughts that you’re no longer good at your coping mechanisms or all the growth that you’ve made to combat these negative things in your life is all of a sudden going away.

In these instances, it’s important to remember that bad feelings and getting upset about things that you thought you’ve grown past are just natural feelings that occur. Growth is not a linear line, and there’s never truly an end goal where you’re cured and never going to feel those bad emotions again. Life – and the progress that you make in it – is more like a scribble than a line. Even if you feel like you’ve built a tough exterior and don’t let the negatives phase you doesn’t mean you’re completely immune to them, because ultimately, you’re a human who feels human emotions. 

What was something that bothered you a lot when you were younger that doesn’t anymore? Was there an instance where it occurred again and you ended up getting upset about it like you did when you were younger? How did you react to that?

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Mental Health Dictionaries

January 29, 2021 in LINKS

No matter where you are in your mental health journey, you’ve probably had to look up a term because you’re not quite sure what it exactly means. Mental health is just that, health, so the official medical terms for mental illnesses, medications, diagnoses, and parts of the brain that affect your emotions and mood can get overwhelming. There are also different types of treatment you can seek out and different types of therapists which can make the whole thing very confusing.

We’ve compiled a list of several glossaries for you to check out if you want quick access to any of them. You can choose which one is best for depending on which of their definitions are most relevant for you!

Mental Health Glossary (Teen Mental Health)
Rogers Behavioral Health Glossary
Child and Adolescent Mental Health (Stanford Children’s Health)
An Anti-Glossary (Mental Health Today)

Note: It is incredibly important that you do not rely on these glossaries. If you feel like the definition of a diagnosis fits you or that the effects of a medication would benefit you, reach out to your doctor to get more information. 

Is there anything about mental health or mental illness that you’ve wanted more information about? What has stopped you from learning more about mental illness? Was it because the information was overwhelming, or were you afraid because of stigma?

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Grieving an Unfollow

January 28, 2021 in Social Media Guide

That may sound a tad overdramatic, but if you’ve ever logged onto one of your social media accounts and have seen even just one fewer follower, you likely have had a million questions begin running through your head: 

Who was it?

Was it because of a recent post? 

Was it because they were annoyed with my entire account?

Should I also unfollow them?

Are other people going to unfollow me too?

These questions are completely natural to have. But for those who have symptoms of social anxiety, these questions can feel that much more daunting and can even be debilitating as they question not just why one person stopped following them, but if others will too. This kind of snowball thinking can have them question if they need to change their content, if they should post more or less, and so on.

Even those who find themselves overanalyzing and getting caught up in an unfollow may feel that this seems a little silly. But in an age where social media is an incredibly common form of communication and way to connect with others, it’s okay to feel upset, and even worried that this is some sort of marker for your relationship with someone. Many platforms have ways to track your followers too, which doesn’t help with these anxieties.

Obviously not all unfollows are treated the same either. If you do choose to find out who unfollowed you, and it’s someone you either don’t know or barely know, it shouldn’t be an unfollow worth missing. This person’s opinion shouldn’t matter to you, because you don’t have any sort of significant relationship with them. If they’re someone you wouldn’t want to have a long conversation with online or offline, pay them no mind. If it’s someone you consider yourself closer with however, it’s really up to you to question why they might have done so. Depending on the relationship, you might feel comfortable just bluntly asking them, but you might have to be prepared to have a conversation about the content you post or about your relationship as a whole. On the other hand, it might not even be that significant and may have even been a mistake! 

Navigating relationships is always difficult and stressful, and social media adds a whole new layer to it. Overall, unfollowing, “breaking the mutual,” and a decrease in statistics should have little to no impact on you and how you view yourself, but social anxiety can make it seem much more important than it actually is. Unfollows from people you do care about can understandably make you upset, but it can lead to a conversation that may need to be had about where you two stand with each other and can come out stronger. In the end however, social media is not real life and should not define your relationships with someone, as easy as it is to believe that it is.

Have you ever unfollowed someone you’re close to? Do you keep track of your followers? Why do you think we place a huge emphasis on numbers on social media?

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by Moderator ★

Catching Up on Sleep

January 22, 2021 in LINKS

Truthfully, the chances that your sleep schedule aren’t the best are quite high. Adolescents in high school and college, despite needing a sufficient amount of sleep, do not get the recommended 8ish hours of uninterrupted sleep per night. There are tons of reasons for this: technology, caffeine, and just being too busy are just a few factors, to name a few.

Another big one is mental illness. Depression and anxiety can lead to using technology and endlessly scrolling on phones as a coping mechanisms, and mental illness symptoms can be triggered by the stress that comes with school and having too many things to do. Overall, it’s understandable why sleep hygiene is so poor in youths today.

We’ve shared a lot of the common tips to help manage sleep before, including making sure you don’t use a screen at least half an hour before bed and keeping your phone away from you, so you have to get up out of bed to turn off the alarms that you’ve set. We also wanted to share a couple of resources that have compiled some of these tips together into a checklist, so if you’re someone who likes to have a reference and likes to plan things out, these might work for you. 

Sleep Check!
Sleep Hygiene Checklist
Sleep Hygiene for Teens
Sleep Strategies and Checklists

While these might be designed for out of your age range, feel free to play around with them and adapt them into something that works for you! You can download them on your phone, print them out and keep it next to your bed, or copy and paste the tips that apply to you most and create your own checklist.

What is your sleep schedule like? Have you ever made an effort to try and change it? How often do you wake up each night? Are there any specific things that you know have affected your sleep?

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Negativity Bias and Social Media

January 21, 2021 in Social Media Guide

Negativity bias is a natural human experience. It’s why we are severely affected by what can end up being the slightest of inconveniences, even if really good things happen to us too. For example, you may have gotten an A on a really important exam, but forgetting to submit a homework assignment that same day and losing points for it is more likely to affect you.

We’ve talked about how negativity can build up and affect how we feel in more detail here. This week, however, we wanted to specifically talk about how negativity bias and social media can go hand-in-hand. In an age where we’re constantly comparing ourselves to others, are being reduced to numbers and followers, and are connected to pretty much everyone in the world thanks to the Internet, there are tons of opportunities for us to encounter negative experiences, especially online. Even things that we don’t really consider to be drastic, like getting fewer likes than normal on an Instagram post or getting a simple reaction on iMessage instead of an actual response can have us overthinking everything.

This is because our brains naturally expect the good things to happen to us all the time, therefore making the bad things seem way worse than they actually are. You’re probably used to having long conversations and constantly sending and receiving content in DMs, Snapchats, and TikTok, so if your friend doesn’t respond to you in the time that they usually do, or you just get a read receipt instead of a reply, it may actually trigger anxiety and depressive symptoms.

The same thing applies to encountering content. You probably follow accounts that make you happy, like following your friends, favorite celebrities and musicians, and others who inspire you. However, you may see one of them post something that you either don’t agree with, or actually interpret as something really hurtful, and you might feel betrayed, disappointed, and, well, hurt.

In these cases, the best advice we have to offer is that your social media experience doesn’t just include you. People may forget to respond for a bunch of reasons – they might be too busy, they’re not doing too well themselves, or they may have just forgotten to reply. It’s not your fault if negative things happen online, and while it’s easy to think that it is, there are so many other factors that can be involved. Another thing to remember is to acknowledge the good things that happen to you online, no matter how small. Gratitude is a great practice to incorporate in your daily routine (and you may do so already), and while it may seem shallow, you can absolutely practice gratitude with your social media experiences. Did you achieve a milestone in a Snap Streak? Did someone you like stream today? Did you have a funny conversation with a sibling or friend?

Finally, one piece of advice that we always recommend when it comes to social media is to curate the best feed for you possible. That might mean muting someone who posted something you didn’t like for a couple of days, or just blocking them entirely if you’re not that close with them. Don’t be afraid to make lists of people who make you happy so you’re only sharing content with them, and if you think a Facebook friendship has run its course, feel free to unfollow.

What experiences tend to affect you the most on social media? How do you feel if you get fewer views or likes on a post, or how do you feel if you get left on read? What parts of social media make you happy? If you want to go in more detail about what negatively affects you on social media, feel free to do so on our discussion board!

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When Coping Mechanisms No Longer Help

January 19, 2021 in Educate Yourself

We all have things that we turn to when we need to improve our mood. Many also have things to turn to when depressive and anxiety symptoms start to surface. 

Coping mechanisms can be, well, anything. If it’s something you seek out to make yourself feel better, then that’s a coping mechanism. However, not all coping mechanisms are created equal, and while what makes one feel better already naturally differs from person to person, the effect they have can also drastically be different too.

There are a number of reasons why coping mechanisms may stop being so effective for you, especially if they’re ones that you’ve had for a long time. For example, it might have just become such a natural part of your daily routine that the drastic, immediate effects on your mood are no longer happening. You may find yourself getting bored of your go-to coping mechanisms, such as listening to the same playlist of songs or doing a specific kind of workout. At first, you might feel guilty that your mood isn’t increasing and your mental illness symptoms aren’t decreasing, but having a change in routine and having certain habits run their course and be less effective is a natural thing that happens with a lot of different things.

Coping mechanisms aren’t always good for you, either. This includes things like substance abuse, scrolling endlessly on social media, and withdrawing from others. If you find yourself turning to coping mechanisms that are negatively affecting not just you, but causing worry and negatively affecting those around you, it may also be worth considering if these coping mechanisms are actually helping you feel better or not.

There’s nothing wrong with abandoning a coping mechanisms (and for those that are more harmful, it can be a good thing to abandon it!). If anything, it signifies that it’s time for a change, and an opportunity to find other healthier, beneficial ways to increase your mood and try something new!

What are your current coping mechanisms if you feel depressive and/or anxiety symptoms start to surface? Have you had any old ones that you ended up abandoning? What were they and why did you stop using them?

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Mental Health Checklists

January 15, 2021 in LINKS

Sometimes, we need a physical, tangible option to help us accomplish our goals and put the things that we want to work on into words instead of having them just floating around our heads. One way to visually organize our minds is through checklists. You may associate checklists with to-do lists and things that you want to accomplish, but they can also be used as a tool to see your progress about something or help you understand how you’re feeling.

We’ve collected a few mental health checklists that you can explore and maybe even print out and use. These are not meant to be screening checklists, which professionals often use when diagnosing mental illnesses, but are instead used by you to check in on yourself. The ones we’ve listed below are all designed by mental health experts and organizations and serve different purposes, and you can see which one of them suits you the best. You may want a checklist of items for you to measure how you’re feeling on a certain day if you feel like your symptoms are more prevalent than usual, or you may want to have a list of wellness ideas and tips so you can feel your best.

Obviously, these aren’t the only mental health checklists available online, but we hope that they’re useful or give you some inspiration to find others online – or even create your own!

Emotional Wellness Checklist (National Institute of Health)

Daily Wellness Chart (Mental Health Minnesota)

Taking Charge of Your Health (Teen Mental Health)

Have you ever tracked your mental health or used organizational tools for your mental health? What ways do you organize in your daily routine?

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What is Doomscrolling?

January 14, 2021 in Social Media Guide

Let’s admit it. It’s so easy to get sucked into our devices and the social media apps inside of them. Even if you feel like you’re not directly interacting with anyone and just refreshing, there’s something about these apps that can make three hours feel like three minutes, despite doing nothing.

Image: Media on phone and tablet showing news about COVID-19

This addicting feeling of constantly refreshing and going to the same pages again and again can already affect us negatively, but if there’s a dominant news story or event that’s on everyone’s timelines, feeds, and pages, it’s not just easier to cycle through these apps, but the effects of it on us mentally can be even more severe. If we’re constantly seeing (and seeking) updates to negative news stories and people’s reactions and inputs on them in particular, we can get physically exhausted and our already heightened emotions of anxiety can get even higher.

Yet we can’t stop scrolling. Why is that the case?

A few months ago, COVID-19 and its effects on, well, everything, had dictionaries officially coining the term doomscrolling (or doomsurfing, whichever you prefer). It describes our need to continue to scroll and look up information about bad events, even if they make us feel bad in turn. We do so not only because we want to keep up to date on any new information coming out, but because our brains are more inclined to focus on and are more likely to get sucked into bad news instead of good news. Additionally, in a different take on FOMO, we stay on our devices and doomscroll because we’re afraid of missing what could be some sort of pivotal update.

Image: Person sitting alone on their phone

As the name suggests, however, doomscrolling isn’t great for our mental health. Because we already know about the bad event, we may already be feeling nervous, anxious, and even depressed. Continuing to engage with this bad news can send us downspiraling, especially for those who are prone to showing symptoms of mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety. We may be more inclined to believe conspiracy theories, or engage with incorrect and potentially dangerous information because we’re getting exposed to it and want something potentially positive to cling onto.

But social media is already hard to escape, especially during social distancing, and especially when we’re in the midst of a multitude of historical events, so how can you stop doomscrolling? Besides setting specific times to visit your preferred social media platforms, ask yourself about the people and the news organizations you follow and how much you trust them. 

Doomscrolling is incredibly easy to fall into, but with some work, it isn’t hard to escape out of it either.

Have you ever doomscrolled? Why do you think it’s so easy to get stuck doomscrolling? How do you tell yourself to get off of social media when there’s bad or depressing news happening?

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