How To Stay Sane in a Digital World
Don't let algorithms and influencers fry your brain.
I’ve been active on social media since 2004. That’s 21 years and my entire adult life. I’ve spent thousands of hours not just browsing websites and apps, from MySpace to X, but building a significant audience, posting hundreds of thousands of times, and interacting with millions of people all across the world.
If ‘social media experts’ exist, then perhaps I am one. Not because of degrees or qualifications, but because experience is the best teacher, provided you pay attention.
And in a world where more entities than ever are vying for your attention, remembering how to pay attention is important.
Given my social media presence, people often ask me how I ‘stay sane’, so today I’m going to share some tips to help you survive and thrive in 2025 and beyond, without losing your capacity to think, focus, and simply be happy. Let’s go.
1/ Curate Your Feed
Too many people blame ‘the algorithm’ for their own decisions. On all major social media platforms, you choose who to follow and subscribe to. Therefore, you have a lot of control over what you see.
To improve your social media experience, unfollow accounts that consistently post infuriating, negative, or otherwise annoying content. Follow accounts that consistently post interesting, positive, and useful content. Use the ‘mute’ and ‘block’ functions if you need to. They work.
At least 80% of your social media experience is based on who and what you choose to follow and interact with. So, be discerning and choose wisely (or don’t complain about the result).
2/ Fix Your Diet
Don’t just curate your media diet, but your nutritional diet as well. It’s impossible for your brain to function optimally when you’re feeding it rubbish multiple times per day. Be kind to your body. Give it what it needs to run well.
The typical modern diet is truly awful and mostly consists of highly-processed junk food. It’s not just about physical appearance and athletic performance; don’t underestimate how much your nutrition impacts your mood and mental clarity as well.
3/ Exercise Daily
Your body craves movement. Daily walks are great and I recommend them highly, but you should also be doing resistance training and more intense cardio several times per week. Being sedentary can drive people crazy, especially when combined with a poor diet and other unhealthy habits.
4/ Stop Doomscrolling
Spending dozens of hours every week scrolling through random, aggravating, and outrageous ‘content’ on a small screen is common. It’s also really bad for you, obviously.
Stop. If you’re going to be on social media, do your best to be intentional and social, rather than anti-social. Your online feeds should inspire, intrigue, and teach you, not consistently make you feel worse about yourself, other people, and the world in general. Use these tools to connect with great people, learn, and share great ideas, not to make your life worse.
5/ Have Hobbies
Many people nowadays don’t have any hobbies beyond eating, spending money, and staring at screens. This is a recipe for mediocrity as well as physical and cognitive obesity. Men and women need hobbies to be healthy and well-rounded. So, create, build, play, read, write, travel, exercise… Just do something. Keep the body moving and stay creative.
6/ Take Days Off
I take every Sunday off social media and have done this for many years. It’s great to have a reset and I recommend it to everybody. You don’t need to be online every single day, even if it’s part of your business. Don’t fool yourself. I recommend at least one day off every week. If that sounds hard, then I recommend two days off.
7/ Go Outside
Humans aren’t designed to be indoors all the time. It’s important to spend some time outdoors daily. Enjoy nature — touch sand, grass, water… heck, even touching a concrete sidewalk is better than only touching the inside of your house or apartment.
8/ Spend Time With Family & Friends
Community keeps you sane, balanced, and grounded. Spending time with your loved ones is a fundamental part of that. Digital tools can help us to maintain these connections from a distance, but they shouldn’t replace real-world socialising.
When it comes to human connection, nothing will ever beat in-person interaction. You’ll also find that people are generally kinder and more ‘normal’ in person than they are online.
9/ Connect With God
Pray, go to church, read your Bible, and count your blessings. Disconnect from the digital world and reconnect with the spiritual one. It’s vital. The human world is jacked up and we all need to re-calibrate, lest we lose sight of the bigger picture.
10/ Just Turn It Off
You don’t need to be online all the time. I understand FOMO (fear of missing out) and am not immune to it either, but beyond my immediate family, I don’t feel obliged to give everybody 24/7 access to me. And I don’t need 24/7 access to everybody else.
If it’s all just getting too distracting, upsetting, or overwhelming, there is no shame in simply logging out, or switching off your phone. Own your devices and never let them own you. You’re the one with the power.
I hope you’ve found this valuable. Any more that you’d add? Feel free to reply with a comment!
Have an excellent day.
1,
Zuby
The online space really is the world on steroids: every temptation louder, every distraction sharper.
That’s why we can’t just drift in without discipline. The monks knew that if you exposed yourself to the world without rules, you’d dissolve into chaos. So they wrote rules of life: when to eat, when to pray, when to work, when to rest. Not because life was bad, but because its intensity needed a frame. Social media is no different. Without curating, fasting, resting, and re-centering, it devours us.
What you’ve sketched here feels like a kind of digital monastic rule. Practices to keep attention from scattering, and to turn the screen from a pit of thorns into a garden where something meaningful can grow.
Well how could I disagree with any of this? My mantra for the last 5.5 years has been “Stay Sane.” Thanks for being consistently sane, Zuby!