It’s important to cultivate a healthy, balanced relationship to social media and the online space.

The internet can be toxic and our mental health can suffer if we aren’t mindful about how we intake the news and content on social media.

Sometimes it takes only a few minutes reading the comment sections of a news story or the common argumentative rhetoric involved on many social media apps like Twitter to feel totally deflated or overwhelmed.

This is something that we, as modern people, are having to learn to live with. For many, detaching from social media entirely is the way forward, for others, being more mindful of the content they absorb is just as essential.

Curating a more positive experience online doesn’t necessarily mean being ignorant or refusing to look into topics that interest you. It just means being aware that sometimes, having direct access to the collective thoughts of people you’ll never meet might not be the healthiest way to help your happiness, and in rare cases does that effort provide insight in the first place.

With that in mind, let’s consider some ideas for how to create a positive experience online.

Curate Your Social Media Profiles

Be mindful of who you follow and how often you check your social media. If seeing someone in your feed gives you a bad feeling, you’re allowed to unfollow. Seek out positive, insightful, encouraging pages and people. You’ll feel lighter and brighter as a result, instead of bogged down by negative content.

Connect With Longform Content

Often, social media or online life can be so distracting because it’s so quick-fire. A tweet here and there, a YouTube video, or an article that helps rile up your emotions can feel fun and engaging to consume, but it might be that you forget this piece as soon as you take it in.

For this reason, it’s healthy to focus on longform content from time to time, that is, really and purposefully using your computer time to educate yourself instead of to just entertain. Worthwhile podcasts, longform articles, and documentaries can be a good place to start. Separating your personal and professional profiles can also help you be more direct with your online usage, rather than allowing ‘content culture’ to bleed into every part of your online experience.

Support Those You Appreciate

It’s good to connect with people online, because sometimes it can feel as though online friendships are relatively faceless. It might be that you use a crowdfunding platform to help support initiatives you wish to see, or supporting platforms like Patreon to support local artists you care about.

Supporting those you appreciate can make a big difference in how localized and personal the internet feels, which can be a nice feeling to be part of from time to time. It’ll also help you enjoy a more positive and worthwhile experience online. That in itself can make a tremendous difference.

Manage Your Devices & Security Well

It’s important to make sure we manage our devices properly so that our online security is cared for. It doesn’t matter what content you consume if your personal and financial information is at risk, after all.

For this reason, taking the time to schedule scans for malware, adding two factor authentication to your accounts, changing up your password from platform to platform, and ensuring you don’t give this information out are the baselines steps required to remain protected online. Be careful about clicking suspicious links and emails, and it can also help to invest in a VPN. Being secure IS a positive experience, and it undercuts everything else in this list.

What other ways do you create a positive experience online?

Would love to hear!

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