How to use Instagram, other social media platforms to boost your mental health

New Delhi: Instagram is an app that helps you stay connected with your friends, family, and even celebrities. It also helps you feel good about yourself by giving you the opportunity to look at pictures of people who are doing what they love. It provides us with an opportunity to connect with people and share our thoughts, feelings, and experiences with others. Thus, it can help us express ourselves in a way that doesn’t require words.

However, it can also have unwanted effects on your mental health if used in an unhealthy way.

The first and most obvious effect of Instagram on mental health is the way it can make people feel inadequate. People often compare themselves to their peers, who seem to have more followers and more likes than them. This leads to feelings of low self-esteem which can lead to depression and anxiety disorders.

Another negative effect of Instagram is the way it can lead people to feel pressure from society’s expectations of what they should look like or how they should be living their lives. It can also lead people to feel pressure from society’s expectations for what they should post on Instagram in order to get likes and followers, which leads.

Thus, it stirs negative effects on your mental health if you overuse it while comparing yourself to other people who use Instagram more than you do. The ill-effects of Instagram on mental health are many: from depression to anxiety, from eating disorders to self-harm.

But, there are ways to work around these problems to support your mental health while using Instagram. No, I am not going to ask you to limit your time on Instagram, or set up a private account so that only friends and family have access to it, or block certain users or hashtags, avoid posting too much about yourself, or abstain from using it as an escape when you’re feeling down.

The truth is, You can actually use it as an extremely effective tool to re-configure your thought process with very little effort. The algorithms used by Instagram or any other social media platform are heavily tuned to promote content that you have interacted with in the past. As you spend more time on Instagram, it uses your interactions to curate your feed in such a way that you come across more similar posts and reels.

So, you can simply start by following hashtags like #funny and #dogsofinstagram, along with a few light-hearted pages. Next, start engaging with positive content aggressively, even if it doesn’t give you a good feeling initially. Over the course of a week, you will find that your feed is flooded with only positive, cheerful content that doesn’t spoil your mood at all.

Also, it is noteworthy that social media algorithms will not only suggest positive content, but the ads you will see will also be centred around products and services that help you manage your emotions better. A lot of times, not being able to get over an ugly break-up or feeling anxiety is the result of stumbling upon the same thought process, which is often a result of “triggers.” Instagram and most other social media are quite addictive to an average user, and you can use this quality to enforce a particular thinking pattern by constantly relevant content.

Instagram is not just for taking pictures of your food or your vacation. It can be used to actually improve your mental health. So make sure to like, share, and save only cheerful content that makes people smile to improve your mood and relieve stress;  manage your depression and anxiety. This way, you can control the feelings of loneliness, isolation, boredom, and depression. The best part is that Instagram can be your free mental health tool, and you need not feel guilty about scrolling miles on your smartphone.