Hi, welcome

I think I have the answer for you. I'm 65yo and with bipolar, depression etc etc I also have social issues that seem to cause conflict. So about 14 years ago I went off Facebook altogether. After 5 months I realised my friends did not take up the invitation to email/ring me and /or send my pictures that way that they placed on FB. Also family disappeared also. I needed a better strategy.

So, on the basic of two things-

• Make Facebook or social media work for you, dont allow it to control you. Use the settings to make that work
• Set boundaries.

So, I'd had around 200 Facebook friends when I placed my membership into hibernation. I decided to limit my friends to 80. I trimmed them down- 120 less and only one sent me a message asking why!! That says a lot. Even now 14 years later if I add a friend I look for one that I should defriend.

I changed my settings to friends only with adding stories to my profile. Who wants strangers in our lives? Not me. I use the block feature immediately someone tries to upset me. That is a Godsend. Dont hesitate. If I get upset with a dear friend I ring them immediately and most times its a misunderstanding- nip it in the bud.

Set your boundaries. If a friend is annoying you change their status to - have a break. As an example.

Social media is great if you regulate it. But cutting it out is too radical, the world runs on it.

Like anything in life moderation is the key. Limit your time on social media and take up some practical hobbies.

I hope I've helped.

TonyWK

Hi op. l know the trap it can all be in so many ways l've watched it all going on with other people over the yrs and hear all the horror stories, baffles my mind. l don't use it at all myself, l have one totally empty fake fb acc l use only for buying and selling, that's it.

Do your friends use the ph , call or message ? l know but so many don't these days it's all sm, no thanks not for me. Although some people l know do use it, we still do normal things the old fashion way haha, phone calls , messages. lt might take time to train them but could you can start just calling or messaging instead.

l have no idea nor givadamn, what anyone l know are doing on sm, works for me. Mind you l know if your younger it could be quite tricky , my daughter tells me no one calls or even text , it's all over sm.

rx

Thank you for your input. It's not really my friends that are the problem, since I have so few of them and have twice deleted my IG to get away from ppl at school. It's my explore feed that has all the couple stuff that I look at and wish that my relationship was like that, but I know it's divorced from reality, but I get sucked into it. Also models and stuff. I've been trying to follow more models that have a body like me. I wouldn't not use discord since it's way easy to tune out bullshit and its exclusively a chat room service. And Reddit I use for community and cat videos. And Facebook I use for community as well. It's just Instagram that causes me the most strife, even though I follow a lot of self help and mental health accounts and doll posts. The best thing I can do is unfollow what doesn't serve me but the problem is IG will stop you from unfollowing accounts if you do it too quickly which is a pain.

Yeah right , don't worry l know very few people either , not like l'm fighting of friends but the few l do have any contact with , well. But yeah l can well understand what your saying. l've only ever opened one real fb acc yrs back and 5mins later l'm looking through peoples lives and their friends and their friends and conversations, the pictures everywhere the pressures l could see people putting themselves through and on and on on into infinity it went. lt made me absolutely sick in the stomach and l knew l could well end up one of them if l stuck around.Few days later l closed it and never went back to any of them or IG or anything else. l could see them all trapped in this thing right there and that the same would go for whatever you were involved with or wound up drawn into through them and how bad for them it'd become.

Nice to know anyway you have the friends thing under control nice goin good for you but the other stuff yeah , good for you though in realizing you need out of it. But the stupid thing tries to stop you eh , that'd be right , and probably right when you do get the mind to try , it breaks it, their sneaky plan , it's pretty disgusting isn't it. Tony up there knows far more about any of it than l even will, he's got some good ideas there for a start could any of that help. You keep at it though ok , undo what you know in your soul is not helping you , you can do it, one way or another. Good luck hey.

rx