The Green Ribbon Library is a developing platform designed to give adolescents, parents, caregivers, and more the opportunity to view educational videos on a variety of topics that can impact the mental health of teens and young adults. By watching these short videos about topics such as ADHD, mental health in athletes, cultural differences in mental health, spectrum disorders, viewers can gain insight about how all of these can affect an adolescent’s mental health and how to either cope with or support the adolescents in their lives.
The website even has an ability to create an account so users can save the videos that are most relevant to them and share them with those they feel can benefit as well. You can check out the site here!
What resources have you used to learn about mental health? What topics do you think are related to mental health – especially in adolescents – that don’t get talked about that you would like to learn more about?
You may think of two different things when you think about social media. You may think that social media makes everyone an open book, spilling all their secrets and sharing too much information so you know where they are, what they’re eating, and who they’re with at any given moment. You may alternatively think that social media is fake and controlled, and that people on social media only share what they think will get them the most attention.
Regardless, social media is a place where we know that almost any and everyone can see the content we create and share, and with that may come a need to make sure that they think what we put up is valid. It can be stressful to always think about pleasing everyone, and the fear that someone you don’t know as well (or don’t even know at all!) can find your content and respond with a negative comment can be anxiety-inducing.
Fortunately, most, if not nearly every social media platform comes with an option to go private, or at the very least, control who sees your profile and your accounts. Twitter and Instagram give you the ability to lock your account completely and limit who follows you, because you have to approve those who request to follow you. Snapchat has the option for you to only allow friends you add to see your content, and Facebook lets you decide how much anyone can see on your account – friends included.
Having this kind of control and privacy can give you a peace of mind: the people you approve to follow your account are those you trust, and you don’t have to feel like you’re trying to get their approval all of the time. There’s also the safety aspect too: only having a few people have access to your information means that it’s less likely to get out and receive unwanted attention. Overall, there’s been an increase in demand from adolescents to make accounts automatically private for these reasons, alongside others.
Take finstas. While often regarded as a sillier private space, adolescents say that they feel more like their genuine selves and don’t hesitate to hit the “share” button because they’re comfortable with those following them. And while silly, they’re still a safe place. Queer adolescents have commented that having this separate account takes the weight off of their shoulders about receiving hateful comments or those they’re not close with speculating about their sexuality.
While getting likes and comments may be validating, they can also be damaging to your mental health and in comparing yourself to others. Private accounts can give you a space to fully be yourself without worrying about these statistics and may increase your enjoyment on social media as a whole.
Are your accounts locked? Are there some that are unlocked and some that you keep completely private? How do you think limiting the people you have follow you impacts your social media use?
As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. They may be obvious based on what the artist is trying to depict, but sometimes they may be words that perfectly capture how we feel, without even realizing it.
Comics and art about mental health and living with mental illnesses have increasingly become popular, especially on social media. You may have seen Jonny Sun’s drawings, which provide cute, optimistic comfort and advice for things that may get us down, or Alex Norris’ Oh No comics, which can capture the various levels of anxieties that suddenly fill us with dread. We collected a few Instagram accounts by artists who draw quick comics that talk about mental health and living with anxiety and/or depression that you can follow. They might make you laugh, if at least smile, or at the very least, reassure you that you aren’t alone in the things that might trouble you.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CCJ8GvslC20/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CC8qMYSjjVC/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CCiYxwchsRa/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CChQNvenRkL/
Do you draw? Do you follow any artists on social media? Do you have any recommendations for comics who draw about mental health?
Tags: humor, Instagram, linksComments Off on Comics About Living with Anxiety and Depression
It is incredibly easy to be busy nowadays. If anything, it’s encouraged. Our culture has told us that we should take advantage of all of the 24 hours in the day so we can be our best selves and as successful as we can possibly be. The time in between classes and/or work should be filled with time working out or learning a new skill or networking. Being busy is a good thing, and constantly being on that grind should be the goal.
Quarantine has been no exception to this. In fact, you may remember the beginning of lockdown, where everyone talked about using the time indoors as an opportunity to pick up new hobbies, work on projects that they didn’t have time for, and somehow be even busier than they were before.
And because we can’t avoid it nowadays, social media takes this to another level. Social media gives us several platforms to talk about how busy we are. It can be chronicling everything we’re doing that day on our stories, posting about still working on an assignment with a 3:00 AM timestamp, or even just texting friends long paragraphs about how much we need to do.
Letting people know how busy we are isn’t a new thing though. You may have had face-to-face conversations where a friend goes off for minutes on end about the millions of things they have to do in response to a simple “how are you?” Talking and showcasing how much someone needs to do is known as “busy bragging,” and while very rarely intentional, comes with a lot of unintentional effects.
Most of the time, when we want to talk about how busy we are, it’s because we just need a reason to let out everything we’re going through and getting it out in the open. However, there is some satisfaction and validation people may feel whenever they talk about how overwhelmed and busy they are and want to keep seeking that out. In turn, being on the receiving end of the busy bragging can make the listener feel like they’re not doing enough and need to be on the same level as the busy person.
Social media can heighten these feelings of incompetence, competition, and just generally bad feelings about yourself for not doing enough. While it can help by posting and commiserating in misery with others who are doing the same assignments and studying for the same tests, social media can also increase our desire for that validation when people respond or even just see how busy we are. By seeing posts about peers and friends getting ahead on assignments and activities – even if you’re not taking the same classes or in the same field – you may feel ashamed that you’re not doing the same amount of work, or that you need to work harder, or your lifestyle isn’t worth sharing about because it’s not as “productive.”
It’s totally fine to post that pile of books and papers drowning your desk and computer during finals week. It’s also okay to post progress pictures about things you’re passionate about or proud of, like yourself post-workout or that thesis that you’re so close to finishing. At the same time though, constantly posting about being busy can ironically make you less productive since it’s taking time away from what you need to do and can not only overwhelm you by trying to come up with the perfect way to talk about how busy you are, but can also overwhelm followers and friends you follow you who are possibly going through the same thing.
At the end of the day, balance is key whenever posting about anything. It’s also important to remember that you don’t need to force yourself to be busy all the time, and being productive and hustling also includes time for yourself and taking breaks where you need to. These breaks can include social media, where you hopefully don’t have to see a stream of posts about that paper you’re taking a break from and can relax with cute animals instead.
Have you ever posted about how busy you are online? Do you usually post when you’re busy? Do you see posting about being busy as a form of stress relief, or as something else?
Self-care has become a term that always pops up when talking about mental health and wellness. The most common image is that of meditating, taking a bath, or doing a face mask. And while this is great, self-care is so much more than that. While these moments of nurture are helpful, self-care is a radical act for many as they learn to put their needs, emotions, and well-being first.
You may have heard the nameAngela Davis pop up a lot recently. As an activist for Black lives and education for decades, she well knows the toll that not just activism, but living as a Black woman can have mentally and physically. We wanted to include the video below where she talks about radical self-care and why it’s so important to be able to prioritize ourselves and do what we need to do to make sure that we’re okay. She specifically talks about this is important for those who participate in activism (and can be prone to burnout because of how heavy the content can be as well as taking care of others) and those from marginalized groups who have historically been told that they do not matter.
Check it out below!
How do you practice self-care? Is self-care something that’s important to you?
The idea of having technology in your watch seems like something out of a science fiction novel at first, with the screen popping up in the air in a bright neon blue or green. Even twenty years ago, a digital watch with a timer on it felt super futuristic. But today, with at least 1 in 5 people wearing, and actively using, some sort of wearable on their wrist, it’s increasingly becoming the norm to have a mini-computer on you at all times.
Wearables (literally wearable technology) most often include things like smartwatches or a wearable fitness tracker (like a Fitbit). They’re designed to connect with your phone through an app and help keep track of things like your heart rate, act like a remote with your music, and can keep you connected by sending you notifications from your phone. The more complex they get, the more they can do, like answer phone calls.
This is where it gets tricky, though. Being constantly connected to your device can have its benefits – for example, you can know right away if an emergency contact is reaching out or if there’s something urgent you need to respond to right away. It can help you develop goals and keep track of habits, including those that can benefit your mental health. For example, you can set goals to get a certain amount of steps a day to encourage activity and making sure you’re not staying in one place, and like we talked about last week, you can keep track of your sleeping habits.
Wearables have also increasingly become methods of improving and monitoring mental health too. Apple Watches has an app on their device that helps you with deep breathing, and many mental health experts and researchers are starting to use wearables as a way to track patients’ mental health and keep an eye out for symptoms. If something seems troubling – like constantly high heart rates or prolonged periods of sleep, experts can reach out to the wearer to see how they’re doing.
Constantly being connected to your device and technology can also be really stressful, too. Notifications can already heighten your anxiety, and getting them the second they happen can make that anxiety feel even higher. It’s easy to put your phone on “do not disturb” and put it in another room to avoid notification anxiety, but that’s not really a solution if your wrist is buzzing the second you get a text. Additionally, constantly getting notifications can be distracting from work you might be doing, and the anxiety with not getting that work done can start building up. There might be the opposite effect as well: knowing that you could be getting notifications but aren’t getting any can make you start worrying that no one wants to reach out to you, which can then lead into snowball thinking about your relationships and whether people like you or not.
If you lean into more perfectionist tendencies, those habit and goal trackers can cause you to experience symptoms of anxiety and depression as well. If you’re not meeting the goals you set for yourself or dismiss reminders from your wearable to accomplish a task, you may feel like that’s reflective of your self-worth and your ability (or what you think is a lack thereof) of your productivity.
So, with all of this, wearables can both benefit and harm your mental health, just like any other technological device. Luckily, there are some solutions that you can try out if you do feel like wearables might be increasing your anxiety. For example, you can choose which apps send you notifications (do you really need to get a buzz on your wrist about a sale?), and it might lead you to make the decision to mute group chats so you’re not constantly getting reminders on your wearable. You can also choose not to use a a wearable as a habit tracker if you feel that it would only cause more stress.
As technology continues to grow, our access to them continues to increase. Finding the balance between what is useful and what can be stressful depends on the person, but it’s a learning process as we continue to adjust to how much more connected to technology we have become.
Do you own a wearable? Do you think it’s affected your mental health in anyway? What do you like or dislike about it?
Our team also has a study that looks into wearable/smartphone use and monitoring mental health! If you, or someone else you know, is interested, you can check it out here.
Okay, we know, using technology to help your sleep doesn’t make much sense. It’s almost a widely accepted known fact that using technology as much as we do can actually damage our sleep habits and patterns, especially when using it in bed and during nighttime. If you haven’t been sleeping that well though, you may need some extra support getting the recommended 8-ish hours of sleep a night.
If you feel that your sleep health has been affected recently, you’re not alone either. With the stress and anxieties that have been, well, everywhere for the past few months, you might have been doomscrolling and finding it hard to get off your phone before bed. You might have been taking more naps during the day because you’re confined inside your home so much of the time and have nothing else to do, which then in turn makes it harder to sleep at night. Sleep disorders are also very common among those who have anxiety and/or depression, and with symptoms of these two mental illnesses increasing, and staying this way, due to COVID, these sleep disorders are likely to affect people more frequently now.
Making it a habit to monitor your sleep in the hopes of improving it might not only affect how well you sleep, but may improve your mental health as a whole. It’s a way to organize and feel productive and actively making changes to an important part of your overall health. You can keep a sleep journal by your bed, for example, or you can refer to some of the apps we’ve collected below.
Just as a reminder though, just like any other habit tracking method, you shouldn’t rely on these organizational tools and use them as a measuring tool about how productive you are. If you end up taking a long nap for a few days in a row or don’t see improvements right away, or even if you are doing well but then only get a few hours of sleep one night, that’s okay! Overall, we hope that finding some method of tracking your sleep can help you take a step back and see what your sleep habits are like and how you can improve your sleep, mood, and mental health to feel like the best you.
If you have a Fitbit or smartwatch, you likely have a tool on there that tracks your sleep already – check the corresponding app for it on your phone to see if they do! Other than that, check out some of the free apps below:
For most of us, especially those in younger generations, we likely interact with people on social media as much as we do face-to-face communication, if not even more. It’s both a blessing and a curse to constantly have access to those we care about, and instead of having to arrange plans to meet up with someone to see them, they can simply be a text message, phone call, or DM away.
However, there’s something about meeting up in person and talking face-to-face that social media simply can’t recreate. COVID has proved this as our in-person interactions have drastically decreased but our screen time tells us that we have spent hours upon hours on social media apps every week. You may have spent hours texting friends before quarantining, but when it starts substituting going out to grab food with them, for example, it just doesn’t feel as satisfying.
Those who are going back to school over the next few weeks might be feeling this more than ever. No matter what your school district or university’s plan is, there’s a really high chance that your interactions with your peers are going to be remarkably different. You probably aren’t going to be seeing your friends everyday in the classes you’re excited to share together or trying to find the best way to “accidentally” encounter your crush on campus.
We can’t give the perfect advice about how to recreate school interactions online – it’s something that’s never really happened before. How do you take the more fun parts about school, like meeting up at a friend’s locker or studying in the common areas of a dorm, and recreate them virtually? How can you distinguish that from how you usually interact with them on social media?
With all of this considered, we want to help remind you that getting an education is vital, but there are so many other factors that make school important. Sleepily complaining about classes first thing in the morning and rushing to finish a homework assignment with your friends in the cafeteria as chaos ensues around you. In a way, these social interactions are not just helpful towards your development, but they also help provide some sort of stress relief with the anxieties that come with school. Socializing during school hours – even basic interactions like saying hi to a classmate or teacher in the hallway – can boost moods and make students feel less alone. The absence of that, no matter how small these interactions are, can have a severe effect if school becomes just class time with no casual socialization.
So while we don’t have any solutions on how to really recreate these social settings, we hope that the transition comes with opportunities to talk to your friends, classmates, and teachers in that more relaxed, casual setting. It can be as silly as changing the background on Zoom to your school hallway when you talk to the friends from school that you interact with on a daily basis, or maybe even responding to a classmate’s story or Snap that you follow but don’t usually talk to.
Is there anything you miss about school? How would you recreate certain parts of school that you miss on social media?
There’s still a long way to go in how we talk about mental health. Stigma, a lack of accessible knowledge about mental health, and the media are just a few of the reasons as to why many, regardless of age, can have incorrect information about how people coping with their mental health and show symptoms of mental illness live, behave, and think. This may require some explanation to the person to educate them at best, and can be really harmful to someone at its worst.
This includes how mental health and mental illness is discussed online. Although younger generations – AKA the ones who are most likely to be using social media – have had shifting views about mental health and illness and are more open to talk about them, they also aren’t immune from slipping dangerous, harmful language about mental health and illness into memes and jokes.
Two recent examples have included the social media response to instances involving Kanye West and Megan Thee Stallion. These are two incredibly different situations and cannot be directly compared, but if you were online as either situation was trending, you might have seen similar reactions to their mental health.
There was a lot of misinformation about bipolar disorder and how it affects those who are diagnosed with it as Kanye was posting tweets, and even a lot of people reacting to him as if it was a spectacle (Halsey, who also has bipolar disorder, commented about this as well). Megan, who is recovering from a traumatic incident of gun violence, was met with jokes and memes about what happened to her, and she even came online to explain the hurt she is still going through and how wrong it is for people to belittle that.
It is important to address here that both Kanye and Megan are Black, and the way that Black mental health is not only stigmatized in their own communities, but is ignored or not taken seriously outside of them, is problematic. For Megan, a Black woman, the jokes, dismissal, and ignorance about her mental health are even more damaging.
No jokes right now. I have dedicated my career to offering education and insight about bipolar disorder and I’m so disturbed by what I’m seeing. Personal opinions about someone aside, a manic episode isnt a joke. If you can’t offer understanding or sympathy, offer your silence.
Black women are so unprotected & we hold so many things in to protect the feelings of others w/o considering our own. It might be funny to y’all on the internet and just another messy topic for you to talk about but this is my real life and I’m real life hurt and traumatized.
There’s no way to control the stream of jokes, damaging opinions, and memes online, especially when a particular event is trending and many people are talking about it at once. There’s also no way to educate them all, and it can even be hard to educate the few people you may be in contact with. Despite all of this however, people can use this time to learn more about mental health and how it affects other communities and share this instead of engaging online. Luckily, although the jokes are unfortunately still there, there does seem to be an increasing number of tweets and responses that talk about why these jokes and memes are wrong, showing that progress is possible.
How is mental health discussed on your social media feeds? Do you talk about mental health online?
Although it’s a time for relaxation, summer can easily feel mundane. For those on summer break, the lack of routine or structure can make the days feel like they’re all blurring together, and for those who work from Monday to Friday, even doing work during this time can feel sluggish and slower because of the heat. This is even more true this summer, where there’s less to do and we’re confined to our homes most of the time.
As a result, Mondays lately can feel…just like every other day. Simply put, there’s nothing new or exciting to it. For some, Mondays are the dreaded start of the work week but at home – even though you have something in your routine, doing so in a space that you’re already spending most of your time in and isn’t meant for your job can make your job and the tasks associated with it more difficult to complete. Regardless of what you’re doing, it’s easy to just pick up your phone and get sucked into hours of doing nothing but refreshing apps, doomscrolling, or getting lost in various YouTube videos.
So to no one’s surprise, Mondays gets a bad rep. We’re not going to try and convince you to make it the best day ever, but in times like these where you might be starting your work week from home (once again) or just feeling stuck in a loop of boredom and dread, making each day separate from each other and special in its own way can make a huge difference.
To make Mondays a bit more special, we recommend doing something that’s a bit more motivational or even completely new to make the upcoming week different than the ones before it. This could mean starting the week off by having your favorite kind of breakfast, sitting down for a few minutes to write down your goals for the week, or downloading a new app to try out for that week. If you’ve been putting off something you’ve wanted to do for a long time, you can possibly use Mondays to at least start chipping away at it too. You can also do this on Sunday too, since it’s the official start of the week, and you can do these new activities as a way to combat the “Sunday Scaries.”
Even if it doesn’t feel like it lately, the way we feel on Mondays can be a marker for how we feel for the rest of the week. By giving it a little more emphasis and using it as an opportunity to give yourself a fresh start for the days ahead, you might find yourself in a better mood the rest of the week too.
Are you on summer break? Are you working? What are Mondays usually like to you? How do you feel about Mondays?
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