Unfollow for your own mental health

You wake up, bright and early. You feel motivated. Today is going to be a good day. 

You get out your phone and open instagram, you start scrolling. Perfectly positioned photos of creative foods, there's Ashley out for her 5am run again, Amanda has dropped another half a stone. Carmen got another 6 PR packages this morning, and Tom and Rochelle are expecting a new baby. Image after image pops up of instagram models, perfect figures, amazing homes. 

You look around at your home. No PR packages, no motivation to run. You feel the rolls on your stomach, maybe you should skip that breakfast you had planned. No children running around, an average house and an average life. Suddenly, you don't want to get out of bed. 

It's a common scene and it happens over and over again. Social media makes it very easy to compare our lives to someone else. I read a saying this morning, "Comparison is the thief of happiness" and i could not agree more. 

You actually like your life. You're usually happy and you have focus and drive. And all it takes is an hour online to make that feeling go away. 

One hour and you can feel like you are failing at life in all aspects. 

I remember when i started Instagram. I made the decision to keep my page, rather than start a new one, when i began my hair journey. I started following "curly hair" accounts, all of them, thinking it was going to give me inspiration and help. 

It didn't take me long to realise that was a bad idea. A lot of these pages are not there to help, and actually cause damage to self esteem and mental health. For every 2 pictures of someones hair, there are 5 of a curly haired girl in a bikini or showing off her body another way. 

All these pages did, was make me feel fat. They advertise that they promote curly beauties, you can tag or DM them for a feature. What they do is charge people for features which breaks up the Instagram models. All the girls featured on their pages are girls who model, girls who are insta famous. 

I spent some time, unfollowing these pages. I wasn't benefiting anything by scrolling through their feeds. All i was doing was feeling bad about myself. 

Spending too much time online can spark a jealousy in you. You follow some accounts, because generally you enjoy their feeds. However sometimes you watch their stories, and you put your phone down. "What do they have that i don't" "What am i doing wrong" and that feeling again of not being good enough. 

Online, followers are like currency. We get so wrapped up in them, that it becomes an obsession. As soon as you notice you lost one, you turn to apps to help find who it was, unfollowing them back to be petty. You see someones page grow quickly, Demi just hit 25k, it feels like she only hit 10k yesterday. This demotivates you. You feel that she is obviously better, so you should stop trying. You check your likes daily. Get knocked down when people are viewing and not liking. 

This obsession grows, you feel down. 

Online followers, are not the be all and end all. Some pages have a huge following, but very little interaction. I have to remind myself that i would rather have 10 interactive followers, than 1000 who never interact. 

Take a day offline. Put your phone on silent, do something for you. Catch up with a friend, take some cute pictures, watch a movie. Whatever it does to make you happy and take you away from the addiction. 

If a page makes you feel bad, unfollowing them is the best thing you can do. Once i removed those pages which left me insecure, my feed became filled with pages i did want to see. Pages that were missed amongst the oversharing accounts. 

Now i can see that Amy has a new hair cut, Jasmine needs a girls night, and Jessica quit the gym again and got a big mac. 

These normal everyday accounts, make me feel normal. So i don't get up at 5am and go for a jog, i'm not skinny and tanned, my door isn't constantly being knocked with PR packages and free stuff, but i am happy. 

I am happy being ordinary! 

Ask yourself why you follow accounts, what benefit do you get. If they don't bring you joy, help you and inspire you, then that unfollow button is right there waiting for you.