Welcome to episode 249 of Live Happy Now.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, thanking you for listening again this week.

There's a lot of discussion today about how social media is harming our mental health,

and many experts advise taking a break from it or even unplugging entirely.

But what do you do if that's

just not possible? This week's guest is here to tell us. Erin Pickney is a Nashville-based

therapist specializing in recovery from anxiety, depression, and religious trauma. She recognizes

that while disconnecting entirely from social media isn't always possible. There are steps you can take to

detox your social media to improve your mental and emotional health. Erin, welcome to live happy now.

Hi, thank you. I'm really excited to talk to you because online on our website and on the podcast,

we've talked a lot about the different ways that we're affected

by our connectivity and how we can just disconnect from our devices. But your take is a little bit

different because you are specifically talking about detoxing from social media. So as we get

started, I guess a great starting point is to find out what do you mean by detox your social media?

Well, social media is really pervasive now.

Almost everyone has at least one form, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and I'm sure there's 100 others that I don't even know because I'm old.

And so we all have these kind of constant connections with people.

And sometimes it's not realistic to actually get rid of it.

Like I think that's sort of the thing that most people say is,

oh, social media feels really toxic for me.

So I'm just going to cut it out completely.

Well, what if you work in a situation where you actually have to have a personal social media account because you have a business account? And so you have to be able to operate your business account and you need a personal account to do that. It's not so easy to just shut that off. I'm glad you bring that up because we recently had a guest who had that exact experience.

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