Creating Balanced Relationships with Social Media →

How to craft online safeguards:
1. Prune your social media garden by deleting who and what provokes anxiety
2. Protect yourself by blocking
3. Remove toxic apps that focus on negativity. Counter these with daily positives, such as Nice News
4. Moderate exposure by taking periodic breaks to gain perspective and create balance in online activities
5. Turn off notifications that eat up time and create distractions that keep you from main goals
6. Remove blue-light screens to improve your sleep
7. Look at computer tracking that informs about the actual length of your screen time

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Social Media News and Mental Health

Excess emersion in social media is unwise. We become overwhelmed when spending hours online seeking answers. The mind is not constructed to process an oversaturation of discouraging material and millions of digital comparisons. When people become flooded with too much data, one response is to ‘give up,’ which can lead to learned helplessness. This manifestation of learned helplessness is related to a person’s belief in their ability to reach a goal. In this case, finding the correct piece of information that satisfies a sense of safety in what we perceive to be an unsafe world. An impression of powerlessness that comes with a perceived lack of control over a particular outcome can lead to depression. It is important to proactively take control over our wellbeing and lessen the effect of learned helplessness.

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World Mental Health Day - 10/10/2022

The World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH) announced the theme for World Mental Health Day 2022, which is 'Make mental health for all a global priority”.

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Fitting Work into your Life

We know work can be taxing in two ways:
Time Pressure – The perception one has of uncompleted tasks and that
time is running out to accomplish those responsibilities.
Emotional Labor – The management of one's emotions in order to present oneself and interact with other people in a certain way while doing a job. An example of emotional labor may be working daily with customers and coworkers, while making a good effort to appear cheerful and friendly, can be especially draining when one is under time pressure on tasks.

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Mental Health Awareness Month

Common signs of mental health problems are eating or sleeping too much or not enough, losing interest in people and activities, feeling hopeless or having aches and pains without a source. Other signs are using alcohol or drugs as way of coping, irritability and anger, feeling depressed and thoughts of harming oneself or others.

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Perfectionism in our Culture

What is perfectionism? What it is not is merely having high standards or striving too intensely to achieve a goal. What drives perfectionism is an erroneous belief that one is inherently flawed and then works hard to cover up what they think are their defects.

People who cannot accept mistakes may act in the following ways:
1. Have to always set their own rules
2. Blame others for their mistakes
3. Say unhelpful things about themselves
4. Have trouble making decisions
5. Make a project way too complex in trying to make it be ‘the best’
6. Procrastinate until the last minute, as they feel their work won’t be good enough
7. Always take over and insist that things be done their way
8. Pay more attention to what is wrong instead of seeing the positive side
9. Give up too soon without really trying

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Suzette Turner-Clark, LCSW-S, RPT/S, RYT-200