3668: How to Be More Mindful on Social Media by Shirley of Daring Living on Self Improvement

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[00:00:51] [SPEAKER_00] This is Optimal Living Daily. How to be more mindful on social media by Shirley of daringliving.com. And I'm Justin Malik, your personal narrator, reading to you every single day of the year with permission from the authors. And we get right to our next post as we optimize your life. How to be more mindful on social media by Shirley of daringliving.com.

[00:01:21] [SPEAKER_00] Social media. My love-hate relationship is definitely strong with this one. As a marketer and content creator online, I've struggled a lot with feeling like I was controlled by social media for a long time. I'd go on Instagram wanting to check something and ended up spending hours, yes, hours, going down a sinkhole of profiles and news feeds. You know that moment when you had to keep pressing back on Instagram so many times you realized you've gone in deep?

[00:01:49] [SPEAKER_00] Yep, that was me. All the time. I even got to a point where my relationship with social media became so negative and toxic that I eventually took a social media detox. At this digital age, using social media is inevitable. Even if it's not part of your job, having some sort of online presence, like personal branding, is crucial because it's just the direction of where everything is heading.

[00:02:14] [SPEAKER_00] If we can be more mindful with how we consume and use social media, we can really use it as a tool to our advantage instead of being controlled by it. Here are five ways to be more mindful when using social media. Number one, delete all unnecessary apps on your phone. Do you really need to be active on every social media all the time? Do you really need to have all of these apps installed on your phone? Nowadays, I treat my phone as something very sacred.

[00:02:44] [SPEAKER_00] It's a device I take with me literally everywhere and use it for a good amount of time in my day. Whatever I do on there, I want it to be valuable and meaningful. I only have Instagram installed on my phone because it's the platform that I choose to engage more on with my followers. All of the other apps, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, I can access them on my desktop if I need to. Number two, turn off notifications for all the apps.

[00:03:12] [SPEAKER_00] We've used our phones so much to a point that when we hear a ring, we feel the need to check it for instant pleasure. The notifications train us to feel like everything is an emergency and you have to always stay in the loop. FOMO is real, you guys. Do not let these notifications control you. Instead, turn off all the notifications for social media. I even turn off my instant messengers, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Line.

[00:03:39] [SPEAKER_00] I only want to know what's going on when I purposefully turn on these apps to see what's going on. Number three, give yourself a time frame for using social media. Set a timer. It's amazing how when there's a time frame involved, you're so much more focused and intentional with what you were supposed to do. This concept works as well for social media. When I want to engage with my followers on Instagram, I set a 20-minute timer on my phone.

[00:04:07] [SPEAKER_00] Then within the 20 minutes, I pour all my heart and energy into replying to people's comments, answering their questions, and liking and commenting on their feeds, cheering them along. Even when I simply want to relax and browse freely on social media, I set a timer for that too. Number four, unfollow from anything toxic or negative, seriously. Sometimes people don't like to go on social media because they don't like to see the random things that's on their feed. But guess what?

[00:04:36] [SPEAKER_00] You have control of what you choose to see. Unfollow the pages, accounts, and people that do not serve you anymore. Your feed is what you're going to consume on a regular basis. So it's important to be intentional with curating content that would make you feel good. Go through the list of who you follow on Instagram or browse through your friend lists and pages you liked on Facebook. By the way, you'll be surprised at how many random pages you like and people you follow without remembering who they are.

[00:05:06] [SPEAKER_00] Think about what kind of things you wish to see, unsee, and what you want to feel when you browse through your feed. Then take the action to seek out accounts that portray that energy and unfollow from all the ones that don't. And number five, track and monitor your time. Reflection is key to building self-awareness. And self-awareness is key to create any change in your life. I didn't know how much time I spent on Instagram until I tracked and monitored my time.

[00:05:36] [SPEAKER_00] It's important to always track your progress and slowly see your improvements over time. Remember that the final achievement is important. But what's also important are small wins in between that motivate you to keep going. If you use an iPhone, in the settings you can track your time on different apps and even limit your usage of certain apps. I also use space to track my time. This app allows you to see your app usage, set reminders when you've been staring at a screen for a while,

[00:06:05] [SPEAKER_00] and even block off notifications after a certain time. Highly recommend. You just listened to the post titled, How to be more mindful on social media, by Shirley of DaringLiving.com. And I'll be right back with my commentary. Look, between deadlines, family life, and passion projects, staying sharp without burnout is tough.

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[00:08:00] [SPEAKER_00] Thank you to Shirley. I'm not sure when this one was written, but one thing I am sure of is that with the rise of artificial intelligence, this is something we're going to have to think about a lot more critically, for sure. Nowadays, if you go on social media, I'd say there's close to a 100% chance that something you come across will have been edited, if not completely generated, in AI. Video included. And it can look incredibly real.

[00:08:26] [SPEAKER_00] That might not sound so bad, but the issue is that this is super easy to make now. Kids can do it. I messed around with it and was able to make a hyper-realistic video in about a minute. It's only 8 seconds long, but that'll get longer over time. So what's the problem with all of this? Well, creators are incentivized to make content that will go viral because the social media platforms will pay you if you create content that gets tons of views.

[00:08:52] [SPEAKER_00] It might not be a ton of money at first, unless you're incredibly lucky, but for developing countries, that can be good money. So this incentivizes them to create AI-generated content that hooks users, often with videos that look real, like scenes of war or crime or natural disasters, things that actually didn't happen. There was one that went viral of the Hollywood sign burning when there were lots of fires out here in Southern California.

[00:09:20] [SPEAKER_00] Many people thought the Hollywood sign actually was on fire because the videos looked incredibly real, but it wasn't. And that's scary. So as the title of this post says, we need to be mindful when we're on these sites, now more than ever. Unfortunately, this works the other way, where we might question everything we see now and claim that everything is fake when it actually is real. So this really is a problem.

[00:09:45] [SPEAKER_00] But for now, best to question it and try to find a super credible source to see if it's real or not. Hopefully that doesn't scare you, but yeah, again, that's the age we live in now. I do think there are good things that artificial intelligence brings. I'm actually interested in creating some videos showing you how you can use some of these tools to save time, money, maybe even bring additional happiness. So if it's something you're interested in, let me know.

[00:10:11] [SPEAKER_00] You can always get in touch at oldpodcast.com or by replying to my weekly newsletter, which you can also find at oldpodcast.com. But with that, wishing you a great rest of your day. Thank you for being here, and I'll be back tomorrow, where your optimal life awaits.