At the beginning of the year, I decided to start prioritizing my mental health. I did a couple things to make that happen. I started meditating every day, and although that’s been ridiculous, I’ve stuck with it for a grand total of 33 days thus far. I started writing in a journal as well, a goal I’ve tried to accomplish at various points in my life and screwed up at almost every one of them. But a month into the whole ‘prioritize your mental health’ adventure, I can tell you for certain: the most beneficial thing I (and probably also you) can do for my mental health is to delete Facebook off my phone and keep it off.
I haven’t deleted Facebook all the way, don’t worry. I didn’t delete Facebook Messenger, either, so all my active group chats are alive and well and people who need to contact me can do so. But I deleted the Facebook app. I can no longer click the icon and go scrolling through a wealth of information about other people's lives whenever I find myself with a free moment. It’s only been a little over a month, and I feel better already.
Facebook is great for stalking people from your high school graduating class, checking to see if the person you’re flirting with is in a relationship, and finding out what’s going on in the news by seeing everyone’s gleeful or outraged posts about it. But it’s not great for your self-esteem.
Studies have supported the hypothesis that prolonged scrolling through your Facebook feed leads to negative mental health outcomes — that is, you log out of the app feeling worse than you did when you logged on.
That’s not a surprise.
Facebook isn’t the social media platform where you post the real details of your life, if you are indeed inclined to do such a thing. It’s the place where you post the edited version of you, the one that never oversleeps or runs red lights or has fights with their boyfriend/girlfriend/best friend/roommate/mom. Your Facebook profile isn’t the real you — and the Facebook profiles of your friends and family don’t represent the real them either.
The other thing Facebook does that’s bad for you is allow all of these pseudoscientific articles to pop up in your news feed. ‘If THIS is happening, get to the emergency room!’ ‘Ten Red Flags that Prove You’re Not With the One.’ You know the kind. The headline draws you in, even though you know better, because what if they’re right? What if the author of this article really does have some insight that us mere mortals can only dream of? What if the secrets to the universe are right on the other side of that link?
Shutting down that voice in your head is exhausting. Ditto for the voice that tells you that everyone else is doing better and feeling better than you are while looking better than you at the same time. You only have so much mental energy, and maybe this is just me, but I’d rather not spend it on refuting what Facebook is trying to tell me.
You don’t have to delete your Facebook app permanently. Try it for a day or two. Don’t see it as the loss of something. See it as an investment in you.
