SOVA Blog

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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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Headspace on Netflix

January 8, 2021 in LINKS

One of the most popular meditation apps, by far, is Headspace. We’ve talked about it before (several times, in fact), and it’s usually one of the first options on lists about apps to download and try for wellness and meditation. However, in order to get the full experience and benefits of the app, you have to pay for it, which may not be an option for young people in particular.

Those who have a Netflix account (or are using their family’s, friend’s, friend of a friend’s, or an ex who doesn’t know that you still have their password) can now access an 8-episode series by Headspace about meditation. Similar to how Netflix released Tidying Up with Marie Kondo a couple of years ago to help those clean up and organize their space for the new year, Headspace’s show also released on January 1st of this year, there for those who want to learn better techniques in managing their mental health and stress. While meditation might not be for everyone, the show is a good primer to help viewers explore and try different techniques, while learning just how meditation can help benefit their mind and routine.

Check out the trailer below!

Have you ever tried meditation? Did you do it through an app? How do you feel about meditation?

Title image credit: Headspace: Guide to Meditation (Netflix)

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How Can You Tell if Your Social Media Habits are Toxic?

January 7, 2021 in Social Media Guide

Though it’s easier said than done, sometimes the best way to improve our experiences on social media is to not just change how much we’re using it, but how we talk to others and react to what we encounter online.

Now, toxic is a heavy word. If you find out that some of your social media habits are, or can be, toxic, this doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person or that you’re the direct cause of other people’s problems through social media. Toxic habits are those that, if not addressed, can reach the point of doing damage to both yourselves and others, whether they are intentional or not. Some toxic habits regarding social media include the inability to close and instead constantly refreshing apps that include accounts that make you feel bad about yourself and cause negativity, as well as spending a significant amount of time filtering, analyzing, and downloading apps to help you curate the seemingly perfect life online. Other habits can include following – or even just checking in on – the accounts of people who have hurt you, trolls, and hateful accounts who don’t share the same opinions as you.

Toxic habits on social media can fester to the point where they can emphasize mental illness symptoms. Following accounts that promote unhealthy habits, such as extreme dieting or forcing positivity, can be triggering and guilt-inducing, and looking at troll accounts can make you angry and cause you to engage in fights and lash out. Caring too much about social media stats can make you incredibly anxious and over-analytical about actions you make both online and off, and if you feel like you’re constantly doomscrolling and can’t log off, you might end up triggering depressive symptoms and feelings of hopelessness.

As we begin the new year, you may want to reconsider how you’re using your social media accounts and if the way you engage online may possibly be toxic.

Have you ever had any toxic social media habits? Do you have any now? What would you like to do differently with how you use social media? You can ask questions about how to do so and your experiences with toxicity online and how it affected you on our discussion board here!

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Exploring New Coping Mechanisms in 2021

January 6, 2021 in Educate Yourself

Given the past year and the ongoing conversations about how important self-care is, you might be considering more ways to explore and include coping mechanisms that really help you. This can be the predictable ones like exercising more, incorporating more meditation practices, and journaling and writing things down, and you may have added a bunch of relevant items in your online shopping carts to help support these goals.

And while there’s nothing wrong with the “cliche” wellness goals and coping mechanisms to help you life your best life – it’s a lot easier to find attractive and affordable gym gear, planners, and face masks for example – self-care is more than just doing things that make you happy and make you feel good about yourself. We talked a while back about the uglier, but necessary side, of self-care for example, and it’s a process to find coping mechanisms that specifically address issues that you want to work on for yourself. You shouldn’t have to force yourself into liking, or even trying, the most popular fitness videos on YouTube or Peloton, nor should you feel like you need to download, try, delete, and repeat dozens of meditation apps until you find the “perfect” match. Forcing yourself to try coping mechanisms because they’re popular and commonly used, only to find out that they don’t work, can even make you feel guilty and that you’re doing something wrong.

Overall, working on yourself, however you choose to do so, can be a long, hard process. We hope that this year provides many opportunities for you to find mechanisms that work best for you.

What have new coping mechanisms and self-care tactics are you considering implementing this year? Are there any you want to try but have questions about? If you want to talk or ask about coping mechanisms in more detail, you can do so on our new discussion boards here!

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Navigating Optimism and Combating Intrusive Thoughts into the New Year

December 30, 2020 in Be Positive, Educate Yourself

Usually, the end of the year comes with articles on top of articles and posts on top of posts about changes that people want to make and habits they want to start once the clock strikes midnight on January 1st. With those also come some sort of critiques, or sarcastic jabs about how resolutions never work, so what’s the point. The cycle is the same every single year.

To no surprise however, this year is a little bit different. While you’ve probably encountered some posts about resolutions (and critiques of them), you have more likely seen memes and posts about what a garbage year 2020 was and how 2021 is going to be a time of revival and even hope. Some memes have also made fun of that optimism, implying that those who are excited for 2021 should expect more of the same of everything that occurred in 2020. 

It’s a lot to take in. While this year has been pretty terrible for basically everybody, we know that everyone’s grief, trauma, and issues from this year vary. It’s not up to us to tell you whether you should feel more hopeful or cynical about 2021. 

With all of this considered though, we know that it can get overwhelming and confusing figuring out how you want to enter the new year. Resolutions and setting goals is a great way to start taking action on personal growth, but how do you figure out the overall mindset you want to have, especially when it comes to events that are out of your control? You might feel guilty for even daring to be optimistic, and intrusive thoughts – those negative, pessimistic thoughts that feel like they come out of nowhere that make you feel terrible about yourself and everything around you – can also have you spiraling about how 2021 is likely to be as awful as 2020. 

Like we said: overwhelming and confusing. When thinking about the unknowns in the future, it’s important to remember that as much as we can plan, anything can happen. This isn’t meant to be scary or imply that planning is a waste of time, but to remind you that the idea that “anything can happen” can include good things just as equally as the bad, which our brains automatically tends to go towards. You have every right to be excited about what the new year might bring, even if you’re not 100% – or even 10% – sure about what’s in store. At the same time, it’s okay to not be excited, and even cynical that nothing will change significantly immediately.

Optimism and hope can feel silly and forced at times, but being able to change our thought patterns to tell ourselves that it’s okay to be excited and positive can help our moods and ways of going about things significantly, and entering 2021 accepting that might be the best time to begin practicing it.

We hope you (safely) enjoy your New Year’s Eve, and in the meantime, enjoy the multitude of “screw 2020” memes online.

What are you doing for New Year’s Eve? What has been your mindset and your thoughts about the end of this year and the start of 2021?

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Feeling SAD?

December 18, 2020 in LINKS

With seasonal affective disorder rearing its ugly, depressing head this time of year, we’ve gathered a few resources for you to check out (outside the blog posts blogging ambassadors have written about their experiences, of course!).

These resources include podcasts and videos where experts and those who have SAD give advice and educational information, as well as some links to light therapy treatments, one of the most popular coping mechanisms for SAD.

Check them out below!

Podcasts

Living with SAD
‘Tis The Season: Coping With SAD, Or Seasonal Affective Disorder
UPMC Health Talk: Seasonal Affective Disorder

Videos

Light Therapy Lamps Under $50

Verishop
Amazon
Circadian Optics
Target

How do you cope with SAD? How did you learn about it, and what resources did you use that you want to recommend?

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Mental Health and Dream Jobs

December 17, 2020 in Uncategorized

Relationships with celebrities and public figures on social media can be complicated, to say the least. They’re glamorous, rich, and doing their dream careers, but are also relatable and remind us that even the most extravagant of people are human. It’s a combination of helping us realize what we can achieve and what we can do with our lives, but makes it very easy to compare ourselves to those with makeup and stylist teams, not to mention making us vulnerable to developing parasocial relationships with them.

This past week, Jesy Nelson left her girl group Little Mix and Mako left his gaming group The Mob (part of 100 Thieves) due to the negative impact that their careers were having on their mental health. There’s a lot to be said about their decisions to leave their respective groups and how social media played a role. For example, Jesy has been open about how she’s frequently the victim of cyberbullying and online trolls to the point of suicidality, while Mako has talked about how being a content creator wasn’t for him and how the lifestyle was contributing to him feeling unstable and that he’s now seeking therapy. We could also talk about how social media has given them the opportunity to be open with their fans about their mental health – like many celebrities and content creators today – not just to help their fans feel less alone, but as an outlet for themselves.

This week however, we wanted to talk about how you could be working toward, working in, or even just considering about how to go about your dream job, but you have to make sure to put your mental health first, just like Jesy and Mako. It doesn’t even have to be as big wanting to be a popstar, or fun as streaming games, but if you’re working towards something that requires a lot of effort and time, it can be easy to believe that the more you focus on your goals, the sooner and likelier you are to achieve them. Even if you accomplish your dream job, it can also easy to believe that only good will happen. Social media can contribute to this, with the accounts you may be following that are related to your field constantly trying to inspire you and give you opportunities. However, you have to remember that you’re human too, and if you don’t take a step back every now and again to make sure you’re feeling okay, you can quickly burnout. Your brain won’t care where you are in your career journey. 

What is your dream job? What are career goals that you’re considering? Do you follow accounts about them, or big names who are in that field? When you’re in the zone when working on something you’re passionate about, how is your mental health?

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