Overcoming The Influence Of Instagram

Instagram is a fascinating little world all in itself.

It offers connection and creativity, it also offers distraction and dysregulation.

I love Instagram.

I am not one of those people who had to learn to love it for my business.

I have fun making reels. I like picking graphics, fonts and photos. I love selecting music and sharing stories.

I am also tired — of building up a consistent Instagram presence for 3.5 years from scratch, so much so that my real life suffered for a while at the expense of it.

I put in years of practice to become very comfortable and confident with speaking about the healing work I offer, selling, sharing my gifts, and being pretty darn real to the wild web of strangers.

And yet, after years of doing it, sometimes it still feels unnatural, talking monologue style to a screen, sharing life, selling and experimenting with the continued evolution of being myself.

I wouldn’t actually be who I am now, if I hadn’t used Instagram, and I honor the ways in which that very app has quite literally connected me with some of the most incredible people I have ever met.

But I want every heart-centered sensitive woman out there to know, that you don’t have to give all of your time to Instagram in order to be or feel successful.

And there are big issues I see cycling through many brilliant women spending too much time on Instagram.

One being…

When we excessively consume too much of others’ lives and creations, we lose touch with our own.

We watch someone go on yet another self-care trip to Bali, observe as they post the perfectly framed photo of happiness from one minute of one day, and we’re suddenly convinced that we must go to Bali so that we can feel that very frame of happiness that they captured.

We combine ‘Bali’, or ‘creating a homestead’, or ‘living on a sail boat’ or, ‘opening a healing center’ or ‘hosting a retreat in Hawaii’ with “if I do that too, then I will feel better.”

“If I do what I’m watching that person do, then I will feel happy.”

But my question is, is what that person you’re watching do, really what you want to do?

Has your sense of self just been blended with theirs?

Do you actually want to travel to Bali?

Do you actually want to create a homestead?

Do you actually want to live on a sail boat?

Do you actually want to open a healing center?

Do you actually want to host a retreat in Hawaii?

Do you actually want to?

When we mindlessly scroll through others’ stories, we’re digesting their life right along with them, leaving our own lives less space for digestion, which is a perfect recipe for further disconnection from self and overwhelm.

Sensitive women need space to process and digest.

Sensitive women need real-life activities that bring them closer to the home within, instead of the outside home that’s still being searched for.

Sensitive women are creatures of comparison and prone to being influenced.

The sensitive woman needs to return to and uncover what it is she actually values, desires, and dreams of. And if she’s spending a lot of time absorbing what’s on Instagram, her values, her desires, and her dreams will get tangled in the webs of others.

Suddenly she thinks she needs to fly to Bali or buy a farm or live on a sailboat or open a healing center or host a retreat in Hawaii.

Her sense of self naturally diminishes, and so does how she feels.

Her body will start to protest.

She’ll start to feel stuck in overwhelm, notice a bubbling of anxiety, a constant frustration, a continued wave of exhaustion.

She carries a weight on her shoulders, a knot in her throat and a tension in her chest that she just can’t shake.

That’s when she knows, her body is trying to call her home to herself.

Home to what she needs.

Home to what she wants.

Home to who she is.

And that’s when she chooses to work with me in bloom 🌸

Few tips for reducing the Influence of Instagram:

Unfollow everyone for at least 7 days.

Put your phone in the cupboard and go for a 2 hour walk.

Reflect on your relationship with Instagram and ask yourself if you would feel at ease and content if Instagram were a person (do you have a pattern of absorbing everyone else’s stuff so they don’t have to hold it? do you have a pattern of giving more than you receive? do you have a pattern of showing up for a couple of weeks and then disappearing or avoiding?)

Plan something fun to do in real life with a friend and do it.

Delete the app from your phone for at least 7 days.

Re-follow only those who you love to be connected with, those who leave you feeling light or neutral, those whose creations aren’t causing urgency in your body or those who naturally make their way back into your field of awareness.