Your mental health can be difficult to maintain as a social media professional. You are online all the time and that is just going to affect you no matter what you can do. But minimizing that effect is possible.

With a mix of proactive and reactive strategies, you can be much better at your job while also keeping your mental health strong. Try one of the following and let me know how it works for you.

Focused work

Something that I think all social media professionals do is trying to multi-task on too many different projects. It’s our nature and it’s part of the reason why we are good at what we do.

But what if you stopped doing that for portions of your day? What if you took ten minutes and just focused on the task at hand?

What happened for me is that I created better work. I wasn’t constantly stopping and starting with the same task. I made more progress with each task and it was done faster. And in most cases, it was more creative. All of this and I was more likely to catch mistakes as well.

And how did it affect my mental health? I became less scatterbrained. I was actually proud of the more complicated work I was capable of producing. And I was able to do more. In other words, I was much more satisfied with my work life which made me feel better overall.

Have strict offline times

I have a phone in my hand at almost all times. If it’s in my purse, I feel phantom vibrations, so I think I’m getting these constant notifications that aren’t at all real. And yet, I’m much better than I used to be when it came to my online habits.

Instead of being fully focused on what is going on online, I started focusing on the offline world more. I collect hobbies like nobody’s business, but that has brought a lot of joyful people into my life. When my daughter is home, I give her my full attention. And I volunteer whenever I can. I’ve made my offline life so rich that it’s just more exciting than anything that’s going on online.

How did that affect my mental health? When you’re so focused on what’s going on online, you start thinking that’s the whole world and you live and die by it. And that is going to cause some serious damage to your mental health and the quality of work you are able to produce.

On the other hand, if you can constantly put social media into perspective and realize it’s one small aspect of a very large and wonderful world, your mental health will just improve. And, as an added bonus, so will your work because you will think more of how it will fit into that large, wonderful world rather than just one aspect of it. You will no longer have one small aspect of your life to live and die by. Instead, you will have so many aspects that can lift you up when you are feeling down. Trust me when I say that really is the key to healthy living.

Step away when it’s affecting your mental health

I give this advice to every social media professional I know, because it never ceases to be true: When you are in an emotional state, you are going to make a mistake because you are going to react emotionally to anything that is said to you. You won’t be able to handle trolls or any kind of constructive criticism. So what will happen instead is that you will lash out as the brand and the brand will suffer because of it. So taking care of your mental health is vital if you are working in social media, both for you and for your brand.

And that means it’s extremely important to step away if you are in an emotional state. That can mean something as simple as taking a walk to clear your head so you can get back to a neutral state. Or it can be asking for support from your co-workers so you can get some time off.

A good company will realize that making you push through when you are not doing well will only hurt the brand, so make sure you able to set the company up to carry on when you need a break. Be proactive and ask to train someone so they can pick things up when you are not well or when you take a vacation. And then keep that training up regularly (I would suggest monthly), so they are always ready to take it over at a moment’s notice. This is one of the biggest investments you can actually make in your mental health.

And then be real with yourself. Do a mental health check every so often with yourself or with someone you trust. Know what being emotional feels like and know at what point you need to take a step away. And most importantly, know the best responses to your different emotional state. You can figure this out with practicing different emotions. But you should also have different levels of work you try to do to figure out how effective you are. Can you schedule posts? Can you write? Rank your tasks based on the amount of brainpower they take for you, and use your ability to do them as a measure of what you should be doing and what you should be passing on until you are back to neutral.

Having these checks in place before you need them will make a huge difference when you actually do need them. And you then you can work on improving your mental health instead of being focused on work that it may not be appropriate to do at the moment.

How are you working to improve your mental health as a social media professional?