How to protect your mental health without quitting social media

Social media is a weird place to practise self-care, because the product is your attention.

Which means “use it in moderation” is a cute suggestion, but it ignores the more annoying truth: these platforms are engineered to blur the line between necessity, pleasure, and information. Some days you open an app to check a message. Twenty minutes later you’re doomscrolling, comparing your life to someone else’s highlight reel, and somehow you now have opinions about a topic you did not wake up wanting.

In this episode, I interviewed Cora Feldman. We dug into the messy overlap between social media and mental health, and how to stay online without letting the algorithm climb into your brain, unpack its bags, and move in permanently.

The three layers that pull us in

I shared a framework I keep coming back to: most of our social media use lives in three modes.

Necessity: work, job searching, keeping up with people, being reachable.

Pleasure: entertainment, inspiration, the little dopamine snacks.

Information: news, politics, awareness, “staying informed”.

The problem is how fluid those modes are. You arrive for necessity, stay for pleasure, and leave with a head full of information you did not consent to consuming.

Cora’s point is that the system is designed to blur those lines, because blurred lines keep you scrolling.

“High risk, high reward” is the trap

Cora describes LinkedIn and Pinterest as having very different vibes.

Pinterest feels lighter. It’s inspiration-heavy, and often less politically intense than other platforms. LinkedIn is more complicated. It’s genuinely useful for meeting other creatives, supporting friends, and finding opportunities, but it also carries a unique mental health load when it becomes tied to survival.

Job searching is not a neutral activity. For a lot of people, it’s rent. It’s health insurance. It’s status. It’s desperation. So when a platform becomes the doorway to stability, your nervous system treats it like a high-stakes environment.

That’s why LinkedIn can be both helpful and brutal.

The danger isn’t only addiction, it’s literacy

Cora is careful with the addiction label. She points to something broader than “I can’t stop scrolling”.

The bigger issue is the collision between human nature and machine incentives.

The platforms are not your friend. They are businesses. They are optimised to keep you engaged because engagement becomes ad revenue. So the feed is shaped by what holds attention, not what supports mental health.

That’s where the harm starts to creep in.

Not always from the pleasant “high” of good content, but from not noticing what you’re being fed, why you’re being fed it, and what it does to you afterwards.

Protect your personal algorithm like it’s your brain on lease

This was the most practical, reusable takeaway from Cora.

If you need social media for work, separate it.

Create a work-only account. Keep it clean. Use it for research, industry scanning, content tasks, whatever your job requires.

Because if you mix your work research with your personal feed, you don’t just “see more content”. You train the algorithm to bring work stress home with you.

Cora gives a heavy example from her work: researching sensitive topics for an article. That research changed her personal feed, which meant she started seeing difficult content in her off hours. That’s a mental health tax you don’t need to pay.

If you take one thing from this episode, take this: protect your personal algorithm at all costs.

Your feed is also shaped by other people

This is the part most people miss.

The algorithm doesn’t only respond to what you search. It responds to what your network engages with, what people send you, and what you click out of politeness.

So boundaries aren’t just about apps. They’re about humans.

Cora talks about telling friends and family not to send certain content, even if she agrees with the underlying message. Because one video becomes three more, and suddenly your feed is full of emotionally charged content you didn’t ask for.

That boundary can be awkward. It can be misunderstood. It can be necessary anyway.

Intention beats guilt

Cora’s healthiest habit is using social media with intention.

She deleted Instagram from her phone. When she uses it, it’s infrequent, and she goes in with a specific purpose. Cat videos. Outfit searches. Something light. Something chosen.

She also uses the platform controls aggressively. Block fast. Unfollow without drama. Cut off topics that spike anxiety, even if they feel “important”.

Because guilt is not a strategy. Feeling obligated to consume distressing content doesn’t make you informed, it makes you depleted.

And if you consistently feel worse after using an app, that’s feedback, not weakness.

If you need the news, social media might be the wrong pipeline

Cora doesn’t say “don’t be informed”. She says: if being informed is the necessity, social media is a chaotic way to meet it.

Incendiary content makes money. Rage bait travels faster than nuance. That’s not a moral failure on your part, it’s a business model.

So if you’re walking away consistently feeling anxious, angry, or hopeless, consider moving your news intake elsewhere. Follow specific accounts that do reporting responsibly, or use other tools designed for news instead of engagement.

Listen to the full episode

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Full Transcript

00:01
Jomiro: We’re online, and so are you. I had the absolute pleasure of interviewing Cora Feldman, who is glorious, and you can find all the info about her in the episode description. In this episode, we discussed and unpacked the really complicated world of social media and mental health, and navigating social media while protecting mental health.

00:31
Jomiro: I feel like this warrants another episode, but I hope that you can get some information out of this chat. It was really cool, and I hope you enjoy it.

00:41
Jomiro: Before we started recording, we were talking about what kind of social media apps you use most often at the moment, of which LinkedIn and Pinterest seem to be two of the most prominent ones. To start off, I’m curious, could you tell me how you describe your relationship to those apps right now? What does that relationship look like?

01:11
Cora: Pinterest, because I have a creative job and because I’m a creative person, I’m constantly very hungry for lots of content. And I think that definitely comes from years and years and years of being a social media manager. I used to spend between eight and ten hours a day on social media across platforms for the brands that I was running it for.

So I have this kind of programming that needs to be filled with something. And Pinterest was a really safe space for me to use and glean from it what I was always looking for, which is inspiration.

01:36
Cora: I look at a lot of visual inspiration. I look at a lot of idea inspiration. I’m really into typography, so seeing how other people are creating art.

There’s a lot of AI art on there, which I think is both good and bad. But I do feel like it’s a good blend of content without the heavier political slant that you might find in other social media platforms right now.

It feels light. It’s brevity. And I feel like some heaviness in how people are communicating on other platforms right now is detracting from the fun of it.

02:32
Cora: LinkedIn-wise, I have a very different relationship with it, and that’s kind of how you and I met and how this conversation started.

I use it as a primary means of meeting other creatives. And I think that’s both good and bad because on one hand, I am kind of reliant upon using this platform as a means of starting the conversation or assuming that people know certain things about me because of this very public persona that has unintentionally developed.

But I also feel like LinkedIn is a means for me to talk to other creators from around the world. How is your industry going? What’s a project that you’ve worked on that you’ve been inspired by lately? I’m still gleaning that inspiration, it’s just coming in a different package.

03:30
Cora: I would also say that LinkedIn has turned into a means of me communicating and supporting my friends in the best way that I possibly can.

Whereas Instagram used to be like, “Hey girl, yeah, you’re looking good in that bikini,” posting that as a comment, the millennial soul inside of me.

That’s more turned into commenting for reach on job postings that I see and trying to get other people seeing that there are job opportunities out there right now.

LinkedIn is such a unique platform in that you can actually find opportunities that might not be as apparent on other social media platforms.

So I try to use that tool specifically to boost the signal of people that I know that are hiring, that are trying to find the right person.

03:57
Cora: But also I use it to comment for reach and keep that hope alive for a lot of my friends right now who are struggling to find a job or are in a job that they’re unhappy in.

I try to post what I would have needed when I was in that stage, which wasn’t that long ago.

I was looking for a job and using LinkedIn in that way myself, and the mental health ramifications of using a social media platform like that in your day to day, tied to trying to find a job, especially in the United States where our health insurance is so integrally tied, trying to pay rent and trying to stave off this desperation.

I was using LinkedIn in a much different way then than I am now. And I’m trying to keep that as a mentally healthy space, not just for me, but for the people that matter a lot to me.

05:25
Jomiro: You’re touching on something which I often find myself thinking about. There seem to be three main layers in terms of how we engage with social media: necessity, pleasure, and information.

We sort of move through those fluidly. But I do feel like the necessity layer is what often sucks us in.

Do you feel like you can draw a better boundary with some apps as opposed to others when it comes to limiting your time on those apps?

05:54
Cora: Yes, and I think that’s a really eloquent way of putting it. Entertainment and pleasure are interchangeable in that.

To answer your question directly, yes, I feel like some platforms are easier to draw that line. But I do think that the overall nature of social media as a system is supposed to blur those lines.

I think the intention of a lot of owners of these platforms, but also how these platforms are set up to make money, is intentionally trying to blur those lines.

And I think the platforms that blur those lines better tend to be potentially more dangerous, but also bring me some of the better things in my life.

So it’s high risk, high reward.

06:51
Cora: Some days, especially if you find yourself on the bad side of an algorithm, it can be very heavy to carry.

You might have found yourself in a very news-heavy algorithm instead of a very entertainment-heavy algorithm.

Or the necessity of staying up to date with that one aunt that you never get to talk to because she only uses Facebook, and now you’ve found yourself in the dredges of AI slop on Meta.

And you’re just kind of like, “Oh no, I’m stuck here.”

I feel like places like LinkedIn and Reddit tend to create better barriers between those three layers. So those are spaces that I feel more comfortable in.

But I also feel like I’m becoming more and more of a Luddite in that because I’m over it. I’m over the novelty of social media. I’m over some of the parasocial relationships that come from that.

07:49
Cora: I’ve found other means of communication with my friends who are also feeling this overwhelmed burnout from social media.

Instead we text each other, we call each other, or we have more in-person meetups because I feel like I’m getting more of the necessity there instead of that necessity high from opening the app or sending a DM or sending a link to a piece of content that they may or may not understand why I sent them this cat video.

By removing the necessity layer of that, that’s been a healthier way I’ve engaged with the platform, and it’s helped me sustain a better relationship with all platforms in general.

08:45
Jomiro: We were talking about it before we started recording, but social media was created as platforms to connect with each other. And I think in hindsight and over the years we’ve realised that it’s become quite an isolating experience.

A lot of people struggle with this word addiction and social media. I don’t think anyone hasn’t heard the phrase that social media is a danger to our mental health.

Is that high that you mentioned, that risk to mental health? Is that the danger to mental health when it comes to social media?

09:28
Cora: That’s a good question. I’m not a psychologist and I don’t have the data or the studies to be able to diagnose that.

But yes, social media as a whole is bad for your health, but it has a slippery slope and it definitely can be an addiction.

I think where the danger is, is the gamification of it. And yes, that’s tied to the high of it. We’re dancing around the same thing with different names.

But I think it’s the frivolity of the amount of content and the nature of how information is passed.

10:24
Cora: I don’t think that’s necessarily a high. I think it’s more, and I hate to trivialise it in this way, but gossip at its most basic core. It’s throwing gasoline on human nature.

And I think that is not social media’s fault. It’s the human element and how we’re using it, and not necessarily understanding how those human elements interact with the computerised element.

I hate to say the buzzword of AI, but algorithms have always been a part of this.

And for lack of a better term, that is a form of artificial intelligence because our content is being featured and filtered through constraints that are dependent upon what these platforms deem important or interesting.

That friction between the computer and the person is where a lot of the mental health tension comes from.

11:53
Cora: I get a lot from Pinterest boards and I use them for work and all these other things, and it feels safe for my mental health.

Where things start to go awry is not understanding what you’re being fed, how much your attention matters to these algorithms, and how that factors into the intent of what these platforms are and how they’re trying to sell you things.

And I don’t want to put the burden on the user here. I think it’s more the concealing of what the intent is.

At the end of the day they’re trying to make a buck. Meta is here to make money for Meta.

They’re selling ads.

So when people discover Meta created AI profiles, or they took money from bots, those are examples of places we start getting into more dangerous mental health and information territory.

And that’s where the human and the computer are overlapping.

13:40
Cora: These platforms are not your friend.

They might be providing positive things, like giving you ideas to start a business, or making you feel less alone if you live somewhere isolated and no one else looks like you or has the values you have.

But where the danger lies is that intersection of the platform having other intentions and mobilising their technology to prey upon human elements.

That’s where I started noticing it within myself and amongst my friends: comparing themselves, body image issues, consumerism, conspiracy holes, and then the AI-generated content that people don’t realise is AI.

Media literacy should step in, but it’s never moved at the pace it needs to move at now.

So people don’t always stop and ask, “I just spent an hour on Instagram and I feel anxious. Why?” They just feel anxious, close the app, and then come back the next day.

That cycle is where the danger is.

15:37
Jomiro: You mentioned intent, and I think that’s a big blurry black-grey box. It’s very difficult to control what the intent of these platform owners is.

But how we use the apps is fully within our control, and I think we sometimes forget how much agency we actually have.

For you personally, how do you draw a boundary and how do you use that boundary to protect your own mental health? Especially when we need the apps for work.

16:06
Cora: First, if you’re an individual that needs social media for work, I would strongly recommend creating a specific work account.

A separate account that is specifically for work-related content.

Because you might love your job, but you can find yourself slipping into an algorithm you don’t want in your personal life.

I would say protect your personal algorithm at all costs.

17:05
Cora: That came into play for me while I was working in sports. We had to research a number of cases about sexual assault amongst different players in different leagues.

Anything that I searched on my personal account started showing up in my personal algorithm.

So on my off hours, I was seeing all sorts of really tough articles.

So set up a separate account that is specifically for work.

If somebody is sending you content that you are not jamming with, you need to be very clear with the people that are putting things in your algorithm.

My mum sends me stuff all the time that is politically charged, and even if she and I agree, the way it’s delivered is such that if I watch it, the algorithm will feed me three more things like it.

And I’m just like, no, I don’t want more of that.

18:26
Cora: Be clear with yourself about the people you follow.

I’m not saying unfollow or block everyone you disagree with. Political is only one silo of a much bigger ocean.

But I had friends who worked in tech and posted a lot about AI development. I didn’t want that in my personal algorithm.

Because I followed them, the algorithm started feeding me stuff like what they were engaging in.

So I had conversations with them. Like, “You might not see me as much on LinkedIn or Instagram anymore.” Or, “Can you maybe not send me stuff? I’d rather talk about it in person.”

Sometimes that wasn’t received well. But it’s your space.

The good news is you can do an algorithm cleanse. You can reset things.

And if you’re putting down your phone and feeling anxious or depressed, or like you’re not good enough, then I would urge you to take a relook at how you’re using social media or what the algorithm is feeding you.

We are what we eat. If you’re eating a bunch of shit, you’re going to feel like shit.

21:04
Cora: I deleted Instagram from my phone. I only engage with Instagram maybe once a month.

When I’m feeling up for it, I go to it with specific intention. Cat videos. Lady Gaga in New York and what people wore. I go to it with a purpose.

That helps tell the algorithm: this is what I’m about, not that.

And I also don’t engage with other people.

Your main currency on any social media platform is your attention.

So I use that block button hard and fast. I’m like, “Ooh, that’s some shit. I don’t want to see more of this.” Block.

That could be something as light as mushrooms. I’m not a mushroom person. If someone does 30 days of mushroom recipes, not on my algorithm.

Or it could be as serious as political content.

Don’t guilt yourself into feeling like you have a duty to engage with something in that way.

If you’re consistently walking away feeling ill, social media might not be the best touchpoint for your information.

Maybe use other avenues to get news, especially when incendiary content is what makes money.

If being informed is the necessity, find other ways to be informed. Or maybe following specific accounts that can give you the information you need in a healthier manner than your Aunt Brenda posting some out of pocket stuff.

24:16
Jomiro: Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with friends and family that you think might find it interesting too. And if you’re feeling super, super nice, then leave a review. It would be super appreciated. And yeah, I’d smile a lot. But thank you and hopefully see you on the next episode.