How to improve your mental health and scroll social media at the same time

As with everything else created by techbros, people like to focus on the bad parts of social media, and ignore the benefits. Take the word “doomscrolling” for example – it’s the idea that when people scroll on social media, they’re exposed to an endless stream of doom and negativity and this bums them out.

However, when I see people on social media in real life, it doesn’t look like a vortex of doom. It looks like a stream of cat videos, funny remarks, pop-culture commentary, and so on. When I see people on social media, I see them smiling and laughing. When people send me videos, they’re accompanied by 💀💀💀 or 😂😂😂 (depending on the age of the sender).

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I won’t say that feeds are 100% positive, because I certainly get the occasional content about whatever upsetting current affairs are currently affaring, but these videos are by far the minority. Let me open my tiktok right now to check. Here are the first few videos on my for you page:

1. Spiderman/Dexter edit

2. Man tries goof on a police officer by staring at him with his tongue out (tiktok trend), but the police officer goofs on him

3. Man does insanely difficult chin-up variation

4. I’m honestly not sure what this video is even about, except that it gives me flashbacks to my multivariable class

5. A cutesy video about some shrimp that were recalled from walmart for being radioactive

6. Some construction workers flexing something they constructed

Of these, only #5 (radioactive shrimp from walmart) seems remotely “doomey” to me. And it’s not even negative in any way – the tone of the video is that the situation is funny, not depressing.

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However, my feed might say more about me than it does about social media in general. After all, tiktok is famous for their algorithm that customizes your feed in real time. And the goal of this algorithm is to make you use the app more, not to make you happy. Whatever content makes you use the app the most, is what you’ll see. Like every other tiktok addict, I go on tiktok because my brain wants to see the stuff it shows me. But what your brain wants to see is not what someone else’s brain wants to see. and it’s very possible that yours wants to see depressing content.

If depressing content is something your brain wants to see, tiktok will use some of the most advanced machine learning, cohort detection, statistical inference techniques on the planet to determine that. And then they will show you the depressing content your brain craves.

Why would your brain crave depressing content? I refer you to “singing the blues”, an iconic Scott Alexander post:

Millgram et al (2015) find that depressed people prefer to listen to sad rather than happy music. This matches personal experience; when I'm feeling down, I also prefer sad music. But why? Try setting aside all your internal human knowledge: wouldn’t it make more sense for sad people to listen to happy music, to cheer themselves up?

A later study asks depressed people why they do this. They say that sad music makes them feel better, because it’s more "relaxing" than happy music. They’re wrong. Other studies have shown that listening to sad music makes depressed people feel worse, just like you’d expect. And listening to happy music makes them feel better; they just won’t do it.

I prefer Millgram’s explanation: there's something strange about depressed people's mood regulation. They deliberately choose activities that push them into sadder rather than happier moods. This explains not just why they prefer sad music, but sad environments (eg staying in a dark room), sad activities (avoiding their friends and hobbies), and sad trains of thought (ruminating on their worst features and on everything wrong with their lives).

[…]

We know that if we make depressed people stop doing these things, they feel happier. This is the principle behind behavioral activation, opposite action, and cognitive behavioral therapy, three of the most powerful therapies for depression. If you depression tells you to do something, do the opposite. Go on a nice walk in the park! Listen to happy music! Spend time with your friends! If you do these things, your depression is pretty likely to go away. The problem isn’t that they don’t work, the problem is that it’s like a feverish person trying to take an ice bath, or an anorexic trying to eat a big meal - all their instincts are telling them not to do it. And if your depression tries to get you to think in a specific way, think in a different way. When it tells you that you should still feel bad for that embarrassing thing you did in third grade, tell it that makes no sense, and that you’ve done plenty of things you’re proud of since then. Again, this often works if you do it. It’s just really hard.

(Man, it sucks when I quote a big block of text from someone better at writing than me, because it makes my relative lack of writing skill so obvious.)

The point of this post is that if you feel like the term “doomscrolling” accurately summarizes your experience on social media, and you’re not happy with your current level of mental healthiness, you will improve your mental health dramatically by getting the algorithm to stop recommending depressing content.

How can you do this?

1. Any time you see anything political in any way, swipe past it as fast as possible, or mark it “not interested”. Definitely do not linger on it, open the comments, like it, bookmark it, or send it to anyone. Swipe past it as soon as you see a politician or political talking point.

   1. “But it’s important for me to be informed about politics!” If you really believed this, you would buy a subscription to Foreign Affairs, which will do a much better job at keeping you informed for like $3/month. And if you had that subscription, you would not need to get any news from social media.

      1. Foreign Affairs is an incredibly good magazine, by the way. For domestic stuff, people also recommend Axios and Politico.

2. If you get any content that seems like it’s bumming you out or making you angry, swipe past it immediately, do not send it to anyone, do not like it, etc.

   1. This includes “look at what this stupid person said!” or “look at what terrible thing this person did!”

      1. This includes people articulating interesting arguments against points of view you disagree with. (Arguments against points of view that you agree with are of course fine.)

   2. Even if seeing this stuff doesn’t actually bum you out, it puts your brain into this kind of ingroup vs outgroup mode. You might find yourself thinking, “I’m going to have to remember this clever argument for the next time I’m arguing with someone on the other side” or “I need to keep track of which of these strangers is actually a terrible person”, which is about as likely to actually come in useful in real life as “I should remember this clever phrasing for my 3 wishes for the next time I find a magic lamp with a genie in it”. But the human brain is so tuned to fight with the outgroup that it somehow feels very productive to know this stuff. But it doesn’t actually make you happy.

   3. I can say this from personal experience. Several years ago (way before the elon takeover), my twitter used to be full of politics content. I got a script that let me “super-block” a tweet, where I would block the author of the tweet as well as everyone who liked it. I used this script every time I saw something that made me angry, blocking hundreds of thousands of people in the process, and pretty quickly my twitter became a place of joy. (Unfortunately, it is no longer a place of joy, and such scripts don’t work anymore so I can’t as easily fix it.)

3. Search “funny cat videos” in the search bar and watch a few of them. This will cause your social network to recommend more such videos to you. Also, if you have any interests, search for content related to those interests. When related videos inevitably appear on your feed, watch the whole thing and like/bookmark them for later review!

4. If you see something that makes you laugh, smile, etc, like it and send it to me, and read the comments. Watch the whole video! Stop and smell the roses!

Follow these steps, and soon your social media feed will be a portal into joy and love and funny cat videos. You just have to tell the algorithm you want videos that make you happy, and you have to do the difficult process of overriding whatever parts of your brain that will rebel and come up with bullshit reasons to continue consuming content that’s making you feel terrible. This is a practice you can do to make yourself happier, and you can practice it every time you go on social media. What could be more fun!