Anxiety is often perceived as a negative emotion. When we think of anxiety, we often think of fear and all the fear based bodily sensations that we experience. I personally think of sweaty palms, an upset stomach and an increased heart rate.
Anxiety can be a very useful emotion as well. Anxiety can help us to become proactive, by planning ahead for all possibilities. Anxiety can help us to preform, by pushing us to study for a test or practice a skill. Anxiety can also help change our perspective, allowing us to be more empathetic to others.
Anxiety, when lacking moderation, can be quite negative. It can prevent you from living your life. It can have serious health consequences. It can cause us to live from a fear based perspective.
Boundaries
Boundary formation and management is important at all times. Boundaries protect our health. Health professionals have communicated guidelines regarding social distancing. Beyond social distancing, it is also important that we create emotional boundaries as well. There is a lot of misinformation, fear mongering and conflict out there right now (particularly on social media).
Here are some tips for creating and maintaining some social media boundaries:
Listen to credible sources for information. If you are looking for updates, refer to government and health organizations only.
Keep perspective. This may be tough given that we are in an unprecedented situation, however the sentence that I repeat to myself is: feelings are not facts.
Listen to your body. If you continually open a group facebook site and feel those fear based responses (sweaty hands, increased heart rate, etc.) chances are that platform is anxiety provoking. If so, a boundary may include temporarily unfollowing a person or group or choosing to keep notifications muted.
Set time limits for yourself and your exposure.
Find balance and avoid filtering. Filtering is a cognitive distortion (thought pattern) where we focus only on the negative aspects of a situation and filter out the positive. Try to balance your social media exposure. For example, I like to throw in a cake decorating video or funny meme during my social media tours. I have a few trusted websites that I know are uplifting.
Contribute in a positive way. Don't try to change others opinions or get caught up in a social media battle. Remember number 2: feelings are not facts.
Understand why you are using social media and stay true to the purpose. If it is for information, is there a more credible source? If it's for connection, are there other groups that you can be a part of?
Give yourself permission to distance and delete if necessary. Trust me, you won't be the first person to leave that group, chat or page and you won't be the last.
Stay true to your values and beliefs and if the content is harmful, don't engage.
