In this third installment of her "30 Days of Radical Healing" series, Dr. Jameca Cooper presents concrete solutions for mitigating the harmful effects of social media. She first advises viewers to examine their personal social media habits by reflecting on the underlying reasons for use, journaling pros and cons for each platform, and employing tracking apps such as Social Fever or OffTime to obtain objective data on time spent. Recognizing that many people underestimate their usage, she emphasizes that seeing the actual numbers can prompt change. The second solution focuses on intentional reduction and restructuring: scheduling limited, specific windows for social media (e.g., two daily sessions of 30‑60 minutes) and treating this as a time‑management strategy that frees up time for other goals. Dr. Cooper notes that complete abstinence is rarely realistic for most users, so the two outlined approaches constitute the primary pathways to "radical healing" from social media. She concludes by encouraging viewers to engage with the series, share their own tactics, and continue the healing journey.
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Hi, I'm Dr. Jameca Cooper. Thanks for joining us on this 30 Days of Radical Healing journey. Today we are still talking about radical healing from social media, and we're talking specifically about solutions on how to do that. Make sure you like this video, this channel, and subscribe. And thanks for joining us. We're going to dig right in and talk about some solutions. We've already talked about in Parts 1 and Part 2 usage, why people use, disadvantages. Now we're going to talk about solutions. So my first solution for you, first solution is to examine your social media use. So examine, meaning dig into, look at, reflect on, think about. Ask yourself why, why do you use social media? Some people say they use it solely to keep in contact with friends and family all over the world. Some people say they use it, if we're looking specifically at like a LinkedIn, people use it specifically for job searching or connecting with people on a work level. Other people say they use it just to kind of get funny stories and entertainment. For a lot of people, they say that's where they get their news from. Other people use it for other reasons, right? There are lots of other reasons: to pass time, to watch TV if you don't have cable service or cable channels, any of that, right? So examining your use means that you start to figure out why you in fact use it. Now the key here is not why you say you use it, but why you really look at social media, why you're really engaged in social media when you're engaged in it. So you can do that by journaling. Start to keep a journal of maybe a list of pros and cons. So what are the good things you like about social media? What are the things you like? You can break it down into each one. What are the good things you like about Instagram? What are the bad things about Instagram and start to track it that way. That can give you some insight into your use and what you like about it, what you don't like. Um, another way to really examine your use is to really take advantage of one of these apps. Um, one that I just recently downloaded is called Social Fever, and it's for Android users, I think. I don't know if it's for iPhone, but either way, you can use this app to track your social media use. It also tracks other apps as well, but for me, I did this because I want to see just how much time I'm spending on social media. Now, one of the things I said in my earlier videos in part 1 was just how much time people spend a day on social media. And make sure you check out part 1 and part 2 videos on social media just to gain more information so that we're up to speed and you're all on the same track so that you can get these solutions going, right? So examining your use could be journaling, but getting an app— so social feed— social Social Fever is one of those apps. Offline is one of the other ones I've heard of, or maybe it's Off Time, but either way, the app tracks your social media use so that you can then at the end of the day or at certain parts of the day can see just how much time you spend on it. For me, this is a very important step in the process because once I know how much time, like in a nutshell, how much time I spend, I'm spending on one thing, it, it throws it in my face and it makes me decide about if I'm going to keep doing this and giving this much time to this thing every day, or if I'm going to decide to pull back in and do something different with that amount of time. So it can be really helpful to use an app to help really pinpoint and tell you how much time you're spending on things. Because what I find with my patients and people in general is that people will always say, I don't, I don't spend that much time on social media. I'm only on it a few minutes a day. But once you put the app on your phone and monitor your use, you can really find out just how much time you're spending, and maybe that time needs to go to some other thing, right? So monitoring and examining your use, that is definitely my first tip and solution. My second tip is, if you're at the point where you're thinking about examining your social media use or you think it could be a problem, then you're probably also at the point where you just go ahead, you need to go ahead and reduce the use anyway. So just go ahead and reduce the amount of time you spend on social media, or a different way to say this is reduce or restructure the time that you have on social media. So instead of maybe going on every hour on the hour or all during the day, on your lunch, after work, at night, maybe only pick 2 times of the day where you can get on social media. You schedule that, you plan for it, be intentional and say, so maybe I'm only on social media before I start work in the morning, and I'm only on social media at night before I go to bed. And maybe you can limit that to 30 minutes or 1 hour. That is how you can reduce, restructure your time. That way you become in charge of how much time you're spending on it and you don't allow yourself to go beyond those limits that you set. I suggest this a lot for many, many people because you have to be intentional in how you spend your time. This is all part of time management. Lots of New Year's resolutions are about time management and just think about it. I'm sure you have other goals that you are saying to yourself that you're going to be better at, you're going to do in 2022. You're going to need time to do pretty much any of the goals. So by reducing and restructuring the time you have in social media, you can free up time to devote to your other activities and your other goals. So reduce and restructure. And really, those are my two solutions and tips. I kind of thought about having a third tip, which would be just cut off social media, but that is very unlikely for most people to do. I've talked to patients about it over the years. It's very difficult to do, especially if you use it for some of the other reasons I've already talked about. It's very difficult to cut it off. So for that reason, I only say there are really only two solutions that I see as ways of being able to experience radical healing from social media. And what I mean in this case, experiencing social media, um, radical healing is really about not allowing social media to take control of your life or keep controlling your life is a different way to look at it. So remember, stick with us for 30 Days of Radical Healing. We have more videos. We already have a lot that are out. Make sure you tune in. Like this video, subscribe to my channel, drop some comments about some things that you've done, some tactics that you've done in order to really kind of monitor and structure your social media use. Because at the end of the day, we're trying to do what? Get healing. Thanks for joining.
