If covid has taught me anything it’s how to set healthy boundaries in my life to protect my mental health.
It has also shown me just how nasty some people can be online.
A new normal
We spend many more hours online working or just surfing the net, than we did a year ago and as such our online spaces have become a much larger part of our day.
Now, I’m by nature really honest and try to stay as positive as I can but a few months back I found myself angry, negative and hating my own online spaces.
Why?
Mostly because they were so full of negativity.
Toxic family members, moaning colleagues and disgruntled people seemed to be filling my spaces and sucking me into a toxic vacuum of negative emotion and bad head spaces.
Thankfully I realised this as I found myself muttering how stupid someone was thinking for the fourth time that day.
Change
I needed to make a change.
Now, I work online so making that change was not at all easy. It meant that I need to be online for a large majority of my day.
I started by looking at who was occupying my online space.
Facebook is my platform of choice and I share a lot my personal thoughts on my profile so first I deleted all toxic friends and family.
Next I removed anyone I had not actually spoken to in 6 months. Honestly do we even chat to that kid we sat next to in 1982 or great aunt Mary’s ex husband?
This meant I was freeing up the space for more authentic and genuine encounters with positive people who would uplift me. As they say we are the sum of the 5 people we spend the most time with and this applies online as well.
Then I started to delete news feed groups and pages as they popped up that no longer served me. No more blind following of Lucy’s cake page or News 24.
Choosing when and what I interact with also does not fill me with unnecessary information throughout the day.
Instagram was next as I work from this platform there were so many brands and pages that just did not resonate with me anymore that I had once followed for work.
Several people I followed were no longer on the same mindset as me or what they were posting was filling me with anxiety or negativity. I did the fastest clean up of Instagram.
I also checked everyone following me to see that I aligned with them. No unwanted Bitcoin accounts or people trying to get me to sell essential oils.
This was a hard one as I don’t have a big following but I did cut down here as well. Twitter is shorter content so you can see negativity much quicker and I no longer follow anyone who is not positive in their posts.
As for the rest of my life, I also refined my email subscription list. No longer do I recieved spam or newsletters that I honestly do not read.
Within a week I noticed a difference and no longer sat under a cloud of other people’s opinions, sadness, nastiness and complaints.
Final thoughts
We will never change just how much more we are all becoming reliant on the online spaces for work or recreation but we can be mindful of how we use our space and what we consume whilst online.
Just as we would warn our children to choose their friends, be mindful of the places they visit and surround themselves with those who uplift them and help them to grow … we should take the same advice when navigating our online spaces.
