03/12/2025
Public Service Announcement from your friendly neighborhood counselor:
TLDR: We have a choice to make about how we consume information, but this is worth reading….
I have several friends who have taken a break from social media in order to protect their mental health. With everything going on in the world right now, I completely understand, and everyone absolutely needs to do what’s best for their own mental health, but please remember this: we can all change the channel. My newsfeed on social media has no politics, no news, and almost no people. Because I have curated my page to be more about mindful distraction than mindless distraction. Here’s the important difference. We choose what we consume. We all have a choice. For some, that means leaving social media altogether. For others like me, it means deliberately unfollowing all of the stressful things (and sometimes also the people who constantly post about them), and following pages of zoos, wildlife organizations, occasional smatterings of gymnastics and figure skating, and features of the natural landscapes on this magnificent planet that we are so privileged to be able to call home (in my case mostly pictures of The Northern Lights and remote places with profound images of mountains and rivers from Iceland especially but really from all over the globe). What we consume has an impact on what we think about. And what we think about has an impact on how we think/become. On who we are. Please don’t forget that you can always change the channel, and that even on social media, we all have the power to choose what we are paying attention to. ❤️
