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You don't have to quit Facebook to get the mental health benefits. All you have to do is unfollow everyone! Literally everyone. Your feed will be blank and pea

You don't have to quit Facebook to get the mental health benefits. All you have to do is unfollow everyone! Literally everyone. Your feed will be blank and peaceful, but you will still be able to maintain a presence on messenger and maintain your profile for people to reach you. You can also still interact with private Facebook groups and things, if you want. This is what I did, and it curbed my addiction to checking facebook. After a while, I slowly started following specific people again (mainly just the people I interact with on a daily basis, and the few family members that I can actually stand). The moment someone starts stressing me out by posting nonsense or clutter, they get unfollowed. It's very zen, and my mental health has drastically improved from it. P.S. If you Google "Facebook Unfollow All", there are multiple tools and things like browser extensions which make this as simple as one button press to accomplish. It can be pretty tedious to do manually by hand if you have a lot of friends.

newsgremlin 8y ago
I took the hardline approach and just logged myself out of it and removed easy access to it. Think I'll take up your solution
enedil 8y ago
That's exactly what I did several months ago. My mental health improved too. I have only a handful pages I follow and no people.
lenocinor 8y ago
Yeah, I ended up with something similar, where I only had Facebook friends if I thought I had a chance of talking to them directly sometime soon. It's been way better for me since then (although occasionally people that don't understand this policy seem to be confused / unhappy that I'm not their Facebook friend).
JimiofEden 8y ago
This was my approach as well, and I can highly vouch for it. I found myself checking facebook at a party, or with friends. And caught myself doing it and felt really, really stupid because of it. But I have a lot of friends that schedule events purely on facebook or only contact me on messenger. So I unfollowed everyone I sometimes check specific pages of my friends, but I am more prone to just contacting them and asking them how they are doing specifically. As a result, some people have been pushed away, others have been pulled closer, and I've found who I genuinely wanted to hear from and communicate with. Though this plus restricting who can see my profile in the first place does sometimes make it a bit difficult for people who I've casually met to reconnect with me. Maybe I'll loosen that up a bit.
graeme 8y ago
I did this also. Most successful "be on facebook but not sucked in" method I've ever done. I started just by unfollowing literally everyone. I have since readded my immediate family and a couple close friends. I find this doesn't change things, and it's more automatic than remembering to check their pages. They don't post much. Finally, when visiting Munich I joined a local group. Didn't unsubscribe, so I still see posts. This is sort of handy: if you have nothing followed, facebook will dresge up random stuff such as suggested friends. With a single group you auto ignore, facebook is content and just shows that. (But beneath family, if there are any posts from them)

newsgremlin 8y ago

I took the hardline approach and just logged myself out of it and removed easy access to it. Think I'll take up your solution

enedil 8y ago

That's exactly what I did several months ago. My mental health improved too. I have only a handful pages I follow and no people.

lenocinor 8y ago

Yeah, I ended up with something similar, where I only had Facebook friends if I thought I had a chance of talking to them directly sometime soon. It's been way better for me since then (although occasionally people that don't understand this policy seem to be confused / unhappy that I'm not their Facebook friend).

JimiofEden 8y ago

This was my approach as well, and I can highly vouch for it. I found myself checking facebook at a party, or with friends. And caught myself doing it and felt really, really stupid because of it. But I have a lot of friends that schedule events purely on facebook or only contact me on messenger. So I unfollowed everyone I sometimes check specific pages of my friends, but I am more prone to just contacting them and asking them how they are doing specifically. As a result, some people have been pushed away, others have been pulled closer, and I've found who I genuinely wanted to hear from and communicate with. Though this plus restricting who can see my profile in the first place does sometimes make it a bit difficult for people who I've casually met to reconnect with me. Maybe I'll loosen that up a bit.

graeme 8y ago

I did this also. Most successful "be on facebook but not sucked in" method I've ever done. I started just by unfollowing literally everyone. I have since readded my immediate family and a couple close friends. I find this doesn't change things, and it's more automatic than remembering to check their pages. They don't post much. Finally, when visiting Munich I joined a local group. Didn't unsubscribe, so I still see posts. This is sort of handy: if you have nothing followed, facebook will dresge up random stuff such as suggested friends. With a single group you auto ignore, facebook is content and just shows that. (But beneath family, if there are any posts from them)