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Why Social Media Is Making You Depressed
33 Plays3 months ago
🎙️ The Awakened Self Podcast — Episode 136: Why Social Media Is Making You Depressed
In this episode, Gianna Badot dives into how your social media habits may be impacting your mental health more than you realize—and what you can do about it. Discover why endless scrolling, comparison, and highlight reels create underlying sadness and disconnection in your daily life.
You’ll learn how to:
✨ Recognize the hidden ways social media feeds negativity and self-doubt
✨ Set boundaries and clean up your feed to protect your peace
✨ Rewire habits and take back control using subconscious tools
✨ Use social media with intention (and feel better for it)
Because feeling present and empowered is possible—if you learn to engage with social media in a conscious way.
About The Awakened Self Podcast
Hosted by Gianna Badot—Certified Coach, Hypnotherapist, and Meditation Guide—this show blends subconscious rewiring, emotional healing, and spiritual growth to help you break free from limiting patterns and awaken to your fullest self.
It’s time to stop going through the motions—and start living awake.
Go Deeper
Experience The Rewired App — your daily library of subconscious meditations and healing audios to help you shift your energy, reprogram your mind, and awaken from within.
🎧 Start your 30-day free trial using code PODCAST → www.giannabadot.com
📘 Free Rewired Mind Guide: https://giannabadot.com/rewired-guide/
📥 Free Wealth Guide: https://giannabadot.com/the-entrepreneur-wealth-code/
📖 Free Mindset Hacks: https://giannabadot.com/3-subconscious-mindset-hacks-for-high-performance/
#TheAwakenedSelfPodcast #MentalHealth #SubconsciousHealing #SocialMediaDetox #Presence
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Transcript
Introduction to Conscious Living
00:00:02
Speaker
There's a moment when you begin to see life differently, when the noise quiets and you realize you've been living half awake and you're ready to wake up. Awakening isn't about doing more or being different.
00:00:17
Speaker
It's about being present to who you truly are. This is your invitation to wake up to yourself and your life in the deepest way.
Meet the Host: Gianna Badeau
00:00:27
Speaker
Welcome to the Awakened Self Podcast, where the science of the subconscious mind meets a wisdom of the soul.
00:00:34
Speaker
Each week you'll discover how to reprogram your subconscious patterns, live and lead from your higher self, and awaken to your life in the deepest way. I'm your host, Gianna Badeau.
00:00:46
Speaker
Let's begin.
Episode Sponsor: Rewired App
00:00:48
Speaker
This episode is sponsored by the Rewired app, your daily meditation library for subconscious rewiring and emotional alignment. You can start your 30-day free trial in the notes below.
00:01:02
Speaker
All right, welcome
Impact of Social Media on Mental Health
00:01:03
Speaker
back. In this episode, we are going to talk about why your social media feed is making you depressed without you even realizing and how you can break the cycle of being so addicted to social media that it is literally affecting your mood and the way that you are. showing up in your own life. My name is Gianna Badeau. I'm a one-on-one coach, certified hypnotherapist, meditation teacher, and guide. And if you feel like you need deeper support breaking cycles and bad habits in your life, make sure you check out the subconscious resources that are linked for you in the notes below to help you rewire and reset and recalibrate your subconscious for the life that you actually want to be living, especially the Rewired app. There's over 50 subconscious activations meditations and self-hypnosis audio recordings to help you stress less and achieve more of what you want in your day-to-day reality every day.
00:01:58
Speaker
All right, let's dive into it. How your social media feed is actually making you depressed and unhappy and unsatisfied with your life without you even realizing it.
00:02:09
Speaker
So we live in this wild time where our lives are literally ruled by social media in a time where the newsfeed moves so fast, where we can hardly hold our own attention to watch a full video or to read a full post before we're already on to the next. Our attention spans are literally being rocked and tested every single day when you are on social media and causing you to struggle having an attention span at all.
00:02:39
Speaker
And so what happens when we are scrolling on social media and we're looking at other people's lives, even if it's happy, even if it's sad, whatever it may be, what happens is, is it causes you to look at your own life, to compare you to what you're seeing in someone else's life. Again, whether it's something good about someone else's life or something bad about someone else's life, it puts you in this state where you are constantly in comparison with yourself, where you're constantly judging yourself, where you're constantly feeling like what you have and where you're at is not enough.
00:03:19
Speaker
And so the problem with this is social media is unfortunately, typically a highlight reel. There are some people who are really real on social media and who really share the truth of what they're going through and show the behind the scenes of what their life actually looks like. But a lot of what you're seeing on social media is a highlight reel where people aren't actually showing their true selves of what they're actually going through and dealing with in their day-to-day life. They're showing you the happy times. the good times.
00:03:49
Speaker
And so whether you realize it or not, when you're constantly seeing someone else's success and all the things someone else has, even if you don't feel like you're per se jealous in the moment, it makes you feel like what you have is not enough, or you should be doing more. How can you get more? Even if you don't want what that person has.
00:04:11
Speaker
It makes you look at yourself and wonder, what could I be doing differently? How could I be doing more? How could I be achieving more, creating more, buying more, creating more? And this more, more, more, more more mentality, this scroll, scroll, scroll mentality creates a state of depression within us.
00:04:30
Speaker
Not this long-term clinical depression, but a state of of sadness where you're in this comparison and you're not in a state of gratitude. You're not in a state of self-appreciation. You're not in a state of presence where you can actually feel present in your own life because you're constantly reading about and looking at what someone else is doing.
Setting Boundaries with Social Media
00:04:54
Speaker
So this is why social media can be so detrimental when we spend too much time. Now it is impossible to avoid social media altogether. This is the world we live in. It's a part of our work in a lot of ways, especially if you're a business owner. It's a part of our day-to-day life to read about current events and to learn about things that are going on in the world for some of you. So it can be really hard to say, give up social media. Some of you may choose to, and that's great. But on the other hand, let's be realistic. A lot of you may feel like, well, I don't want to. i enjoy my social media and I don't want to give it up.
00:05:30
Speaker
And so that's okay too. Whatever boat you're in it's totally fine. But the truth of the matter is there needs to be some level of boundary with it. There should be no doom scrolling. There should be no like every day.
00:05:43
Speaker
And you certainly don't need to be on social media every single day. You don't need to show up on there every day. No matter what any expert or influencer tells you, you really don't need to show up on there every day if it's not making you feel good, if it doesn't support your mental health.
00:06:00
Speaker
If you feel like you're constantly not feeling good about yourself or not enough or comparing yourself to others, it's time to take a look at how social media is actually affecting your mental health. Because in a lot of ways, social media is destroying our mental health.
00:06:15
Speaker
And it doesn't need to be this way. So here's some things I recommend you do. Some of it is around social media cleanup and some of it is around rewiring your own habits. Number one is cleaning up your social media feed. Do you need to follow all the people you follow?
00:06:31
Speaker
you need to be on the For You page seeing random videos that you didn't ask for? Do you need to be on the Explore page on Instagram seeing things that you didn't ask for that just pop up in your face? Don't scroll there. Now, if there are people and accounts that you enjoy and make you feel good and you know you want to follow because it's people you care about, follow those people.
00:06:50
Speaker
Clean up your list of followers. You don't need to follow so many people just because. You can mute people. You can unfollow them. You can mute accounts. Whatever you want to do. Mute, unfollow, clean up your following list. Make sure that everyone that you are following adds to your life, adds to your mental health, doesn't take away from your life, doesn't take away from your mental health.
00:07:17
Speaker
You should follow accounts that bring joy to your life. You want to see their posts. You don't see it and and feel bad about yourself or you don't see it and feel jealousy. If you do feel that when you're scrolling, you should go ahead and unfollow whatever that is right away.
00:07:32
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So suggestion number one is clean up your followers, delete, remove, mute, whatever you need to do. You got to clean it up.
Intentional Social Media Use
00:07:43
Speaker
The second piece of this is rewiring your pattern around scrolling and time that you're spending on social media. And the reason why you do need to bring the subconscious into this is because scrolling is a habit. It's a habit that you have learned through the power of repetition and the subconscious gets programmed through repetition. And so because over the years you've made this habit of scrolling and being on social media, you just do it every day. You open the app and you don't even know why. a lot of times we just click on the instagram app or the tick tock app or the youtube app and we don't even know why we did it we didn't consciously choose it we just we just did it right and that's because your subconscious has been programmed to open those apps and scroll because of repetition because of years and years of you doing that so to break that cycle and to be more intentional about when you are actually choosing to be on social media and choosing to scroll you have to rewire your habits you need to break the cycle and this is where doing something like subconscious meditation and hypnosis is really effective because you can rewire your subconscious to break that addiction to scrolling to break that automatic pattern of just opening up instagram so if you want to start utilizing hypnosis and subconscious meditation to break some habits and cycles in your life beyond just social media Make sure you grab access to the rewired meditations that I mentioned in the beginning. Those will help you so, so much.
00:09:08
Speaker
Now, another piece of this is again, breaking the cycle, your subconscious support of listening to the meditations and the hypnosis audios is going to be tremendously helpful if you are choosing to do it every day, but something else you need to do is just stop opening the app.
00:09:24
Speaker
Stop opening the app. Take a break from opening it so that you break the cycle of opening it. I'd say take about two weeks of just not opening it at all. It takes two weeks to break a habit, 21 days to be exact, to break a habit fully or to start breaking a habit. Not all habits are going to be broken in 21 days. So don't quote me on that. But it takes around 21 days to actually start to break a habit, to get in the the process of breaking that habit. So take at least two weeks, one to two weeks, and just don't open the app at all. And then when you come back, you can be intentional. You can look at the app before you open it and say, do I want to go on Instagram right now? Do I want to go on YouTube or TikTok? And asking yourself the question, what do I hope to gain from being on this app? What do I want from it? Do I want to catch up with family and friends? Do I want to learn something from some of the accounts I follow? Is there information that I'm seeking? Do I want to read some reviews? or check out a new product, whatever it is, have an intention behind why you are doing it. You're not just opening the app to doom scroll and get lost in the feed.
00:10:33
Speaker
That is dangerous. And that is what is causing you to be depressed without you even realizing it. That is what is causing you to start comparing yourself and judging yourself without you even realizing it.
00:10:45
Speaker
But again, we can use social media in an intentional way by setting an intention behind why you're opening the app. What do you hope to achieve or learn or do by opening the app? What will it give to you in that given moment? What are you hoping it will give to you in that given moment? And when we are more intentional about what we want from it, that's when it's not so, that's when the apps don't affect your mental health unconsciously without you even realizing it because you're being intentional and there's awareness behind what you are actually doing. So these are some tips that you can use to start rewiring and reprogramming the way that you are using social media so that you can use it in a way that actually adds to your life and doesn't take away from your mental health and doesn't cause you to feel comparison or jealousy or to feel depressed without you even realizing it because you are comparing yourself to others and you are getting stuck in the feed and you
00:11:44
Speaker
wake up from doom scrolling and you feel like a mush brain because you don't even know how much time you just wasted scrolling on a
Engage with the Podcast Community
00:11:50
Speaker
useless app. There's ways around it. There's ways we can use social media in an intentional way. and of course it requires you bring the subconscious into it. Like any other level of transformation, we need to rewire the way you are doing these things at the subconscious level.
00:12:04
Speaker
So try on these suggestions. I guarantee they're going to totally transform and shift the way you are using social media so that it can actually be something that adds to your life and doesn't take away. And of course you don't need to use it all the time.
00:12:20
Speaker
Be intentional about how you are using it, why you are using it, set an intention behind it before you open it and don't spend too much time on it. That's really the key.
00:12:31
Speaker
Close the app. You don't need to be on there. Go live your life. Go do something. Go call a friend. Go outside. There's so many other things that you could be doing besides sitting on social media, and you already know that. So I hope these suggestions were helpful. Part of your journey of awakening and healing and transformation requires you to be more present. And when you are lost in social media, you are far from present. You are actually the complete opposite of being present. So the more you're able to be in your body and in your life, the more present you're going to be, which means less time on social media.
00:13:07
Speaker
So I hope this is supportive and helpful for you. And if you love this episode, make sure you subscribe and you hit that notification bell so you don't miss a single episode along this incredible journey. And I'll see you next time.
00:13:19
Speaker
Thank you for awakening with me today. If this episode spoke to your soul, i would love to hear what resonated most. Come connect with me over on Instagram at Gianna Badeau and share your takeaways.
00:13:31
Speaker
And I would be so grateful if you could leave a review so this podcast can reach more and more people. And if you're ready to go even deeper into this work, explore the Rewired app, a daily toolkit of subconscious meditations to help you rewire your mind, regulate your nervous system, and return to peace.
00:13:50
Speaker
You can start your 30-day free trial using the code podcast through the link in the description below. Until next time, stay awake, stay grounded, and keep returning home to your awakened self.