How to feel better about yourself and have an online presence that matches your current self, through the simple action of unfollowing.
Having been diagnosed with being addicted to Instagram by my mother, I feel qualified to write a post or two about the topic, and hopefully reflect while doing it as well. I am aware of the balance needed to maintain a healthy relationship with social media, but I will discuss that another time.
As the title explains, I am going to be talking about the advantages of unfollowing people on Instagram ( Seriously, if it isn’t already, it should be the new trend). Recently I was feeling uncomfortable on my own Instagram and didn’t post as much as I usually did. Which is ok to have some more inactive periods, but this time a bad taste remained in my mouth the whole time. After a while, I started to notice how fast I passed all the Instagram Stories, not even looking or caring about most people. Perhaps there were ten or twenty that I looked forward to.
Thankfully I realized this habit and I decided to do something about it. I unfollowed twenty percent of all the accounts that I was following. Most of them were old friends from High School, people who I haven’t spoken to in years and, to be perfectly honest, don’t care what they are up to. Besides, some of them were even people I hated. People who bullied me. And I was following them!
Anyways, since I have been unfollowing people, I have had time to collect myself and enjoy the advantages that comes with it, so I will try to explain them clearly.
I can focus more on what matters
Now that I have cleaned my Instagram, I have so much space for the people that I actually care about, and now I can keep up with them more regularly. Since I unfollowed many accounts that weren’t providing motivation, inspiration, education or any other ‘-ations’ to my life, I can spend more time seeing posts that I feel drawn to. I have time to read the descriptions and check out the products and people tagged in it. Overall, I can focus on posts that provide value to my life, and potentially improve it.
I have freed myself from the past
Since I stopped following many old friends, a huge feeling of freedom and push forward came with that simple action. The best way I can explain it is with the feeling of having weights, which were the people from my town following me and (I thought) expecting me to be the me they knew from High School, and when I unfollowed them having the weight lifted. Then I was able to let my true and evolved self through the screen. Now I allow zero restraints from expectations of who I am.
The feeling of control over your audience (and life)
Unless you have your account on Private, you can not control the people that can see your account. But since mine isn’t, I discovered something quite rudimentary but effective. If you stop following the people that you don’t wish were seeing your content, you eventually forget about them and it’s like they don’t even watch you anymore (no matter if they still do or don’t, we don’t care). Now you can post that picture that you were afraid some person was going to judge or share articles about whatever. The feeling of control over your content now is improved, and you are more connected to yourself than ever.
Extra: the opportunity to start fresh. Reintroduce yourself.
The most empowering feeling from this experience, without a doubt, is how now you feel like you can be the new you that you feel inside. Be connected with your inner self and show it to the world. After I unfollowed old accounts, I went through a process of rediscovering myself and showing this new me online.
It sounds like a total liberation, but keep in mind that this is only about the Instagram realm. The most important is how you feel in the real physical world. These actions did allow me to have an improved and better online presence, as well as feeling better about it, but it is a daily exercise to find confidence in yourself to confront the world and unfollowing old unproductive accounts sure does help.
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