Navigating Instagram Tools for Mental Zen and Mindful Scrolling

By Pritika Mullassery

Remember the buzz about the latest OTT-released movie “Kho Gaye Hum Kahan ?” Somewhere we all relate to it so much, right? The active draw of social media and how it majorly affects our mental health. It creates this mindset of comparing your life with others by looking at what’s going on in their lives. What was shown in the movie was the aftermath of the overuse of social media for unhealthy amounts of hours. The healthy amount of hours can be generalised as per masses but at the same time differs from person to person and the content they are consuming. But what can we do to not reach that stage where social media becomes a daily necessity rather than just an app for infotainment? Social Media apps have given a few tools that might help curb these issues to a very large extent. Instagram has topped the charts for the most amount of in-app tools that might be helpful for healthy scrolling and mental zen. However, a lot of users do not know about these tools. So today we are going to brush up few of the important tools that Instagram offers so as to monitor the digital well-being of users according to their personalized healthy amounts of hours.

You know how sometimes you do not realize how much time you’ve spent on social media throughout the day or week? That’s where the “Activity Dashboard” tool comes to work. This is a crucial tool for understanding and tabulating our activity time and average time spent on the app each day. This can be accessed through the “Your Activity” dashboard in the Settings menu. Regularly keeping a check on the hours spent on the platform keeps us well-assessed about how much time should be self-imposed for such platforms.

I just somehow found myself spending extensive amounts of hours on social media although I know how much time has been spent. Well for that we have a “Manage your Time” tool. This tool is divided into three parts; first being “Break Reminder” which helps to schedule a reminder to take regular breaks from scrolling . This tool gives a notification every time you get so immersed in scrolling so much at one go that you forget about the time spent. Second part of this tool would be the “Quiet Mode” which helps you mute notifications and /or auto reply to messages at night or whenever you need to focus.The third part would be the “Daily Limit” tool that limits the amount of time you spend on Instagram each day by setting a reminder to close the app. Now this helps you understand when you have overused the app and mindlessly scrolled to the point where you are crossing your self imposed time of being on instagram. You can find these tools in Settings and Privacy> Time Spent > Manage Your Time.

I am able to manage my time as well but there are days where my phone keeps buzzing up with notifications . That’s where the “Notification Settings” comes into role. You can customize your notification settings to control the frequency and type of notification you are receiving. These have different variations of tools like Pause All Notifications which helps in temporarily muting all the notifications. It also has specific notification settings like post stories and comments ; followers and following ; messages; calls; live and reels etc. These can be personalized according to a person’s needs, wants and restrictions. You can access these settings in the Notifications tab of Settings and Privacy.

Are there times you feel like you don’t want people to reply to certain stories of yours ? or do you feel like this one person keeps bothering you by replying to your stories ? For such

issues we have “Story Control “ .Customizations can be made as to who can reply to your stories by limiting responses to your followers , a selected group of people , or just turning off replies altogether . This can help manage the influx of messages and maintain a more controlled inbox. This can be accessed by just going to the “Story Settings” available in the “Camera Settings”. You can also control if other people are allowed to share your stories to either their story or share it in the message inbox to others or not in the story settings itself.

This next tool that I’m going to introduce you to , was one of gen z’s most awaited tools for instagram as they suffered from this craving of like and comment validations. The “Hide Likes “ Instagram feature to hide the number of likes on posts which allows us to reduce the potential pressure associated with receiving a certain number of likes. These settings can be found in Settings and Privacy > Like and Share Counts

Although “Profile Privacy” has been theer on instagram since it first started lets brush over its use once again . Shall we ? You can make your account public or private depending upon your comfort and privacy concerns. If you only want certain people to be able to view your profile and what you post then you can always make your account Private by going into Settings and Privacy> Account Privacy.

“Close Friends List” tool is a rather new tool. This tool can be used as a way to filter out a few people you want to show certain posts to while still keeping your account accessible to everyone. It helps to share content with a selected group of people without giving the feeling of broadcasting your life to everyone. You can add as many people as you want and filter the people out or add more people to it as and when required. This close friends list can be found in the Settings Menu.

“Keyword Filters” is something everyone using social media needs to know about . This is a very essential tool in today’s generation where anonymity remains a huge issue on social media . This tool helps to hide comments and messages that contain specific words or phrases. This tool filters out negative comments and creates a positive and encouraging comments section for your posts. To activate this tool you need to go to settings and Privacy > Hidden Words . There are a number of ways in which you can customize this tool according to your aspect of creating a positive environment experience on digital platforms .

Lets not forget “Restrict and Block”. Remember the number of people that might have been blocked because there were so many angel priya’s on instagram and facebook during the peak popularity of instagram in 2010’s. You can restrict as well as block certain accounts that you think are spreading hate or are trying to bully you online . This tool helps in managing interactions with users who may be causing you stress or negativity. You could block or restrict a certain account by opening their profile clicking on the three dots >Block/Restrict.

This is a rather new concept of “Content Filtering”. This tool helps curate and control your feed with the type of content you would like to consume . You can filter out sensitive content or even offensive content in the explore page section of instagram . To turn on this tool you can go to Settings and Privacy > Suggested Content .

Have you noticed that instagram keeps asking you in intervals of time below every reel if you are interested to watch that reel or not ? Well that is a part of “Explore Page Preferences” .

Now you can set your algorithm preferences as to what content you want to familiarize yourself with or encounter in your scrolling pattern.

“Favorites” is also a new tool that has been introduced to curate your feeds with just specific content that you would like to encounter from specific accounts . You can add accounts to your favorites by clicking on the instagram logo on the home page above stories to go to favorites and then create a list for the accounts , who’s contents you would like to see specifically .

You can also turn off “Suggested Posts” so that you are not able to see any posts other than the accounts you follow . this can be done by the following these steps : Settings and Privacy> Suggested Content>Snooze Suggested Post

“Scheduling posts” is also another tool that can be used to curb the excessive use of the app as you don’t have to keep yourself on the platform for long hours until the post you are planning to put is up. You can schedule a post by just selecting the photos you wanna post and then on the add captions page you can find schedule post tool

Instagram is a powerful social media app for connections like any other platform. However being mindful is an essential aspect to avoid negative impact on social media. These tools help reduce and give social media a qualitative approach at infotainment. It is the users who take control over digital experiences and foster improved mental well being with help of such tools. Through media literacy about the tools, workings and intricacies of such apps we can navigate through instagram with a more positive and healthy approach.