What does triggering mean to you? For me, I know I’m triggered when I suddenly feel anxious, uncomfortable and self-conscious. Triggers can pop up anywhere, but for so long, it felt like all my triggers were located right in my phone — in the little universe of my Instagram feed. And it wasn’t until I actively decided to unfollow the accounts that made me feel worse about my body that I regained a new sense of freedom!
Models, actresses, fitness accounts. Anything and everything that made me feel like I needed to restrict, work out more, eat less and starve myself to look like them got cut out and unfollowed. Now my feed is filled more with updates from my friends, inspirational quotes and pictures of cats — and I wouldn’t have it any other way! Even my explore page picked up on the changes now only gives me positive content.
Side note: sometimes our friends (our “IRL” friends that is) can be triggering. We usually don’t want to resort to the dreaded “unfollow” option for someone that we know in real life to avoid drama, but there is still the “mute” option for those situations! Then their posts and stories won’t show up on your feed — and you’ll be far less triggered!
Since the advent of social medial there has been a correlation between the increase of Instagram and the increase of eating disorders. In fact, teenagers who use Instagram (which is pretty much all teenagers at this point) are over 2x more likely to develop disordered eating and a disordered relationship with their body.
And it doesn’t stop there. Facetune is now the #2 most downloaded and paid for app. That means that most of the pictures that you are seeing on your phone are photoshopped with Facetune.
What you consume on social media is highly important – it’s one of the things we interact with most on a daily basis and thus is a huge influence on all of our lives. If you’re feeling that itch of negative comparison or negative self-thought, then do yourself a huge long term favor and hit that unfollow button.
This was taken from our “Self-love Starfish Tip” series on… what else… Insta! Check it out here
Read more about the effects of cyberbulling through social media and the connection to eating disorders here
Read more about how comparison through social media fuels comparison in EDs – and how social media can be helpful in online recovery communities too here
xx Ellen