📲 Community Health and Social Media

Community Updates

💟 If you're enjoying this newsletter, would you consider nominating me for the 2026 Best of Ravenswood Award? For the "Favorite Wellness Provider" category, please!

⭐ A walking tour is a good way to get some movement in with your friends! Check out this October's Walking Chicago schedule and plan your next trip.

⭐ See my friend Molly Z's art on display at Everybody's Coffee in Uptown. It's on display until December.

⭐ The midterm election is coming up! If you're in Chicago, vote by mail here. Better yet, permanently vote my mail by using this form.

One Thing I'm Enjoying...

📚 Reading this week: How Eddie Van Halen Helped a Young Black Kid Find Meaning in Rock and Roll. Check out this essay, reposted on Substack from the writer's Tumblr.

📺 Watching this week: Scary movies in honor of the season! Ready or Not, The Monkey, and Longlegs. Those last two were written and directed by Osgood Perkins, the son of Anthony "Psycho" Perkins.

🎶 Listening to this week: The Killers' Brandon Flowers's solo album THRASHER. Earnest Americana, gorgeous and stripped down.

🎉 Happy Saturday, Friends!

Here at StrongWithDana, we believe that wellness goes way beyond the physical. That's why so many of these newsletter issues are about mindset shifts, small changes, and how to navigate your relationship with movement, rather than 7 moves you need to add to your workout RIGHT NOW.

Today, I want to talk about another way to manage your health and the health of those around you: engaging mindfully with social media.

And I'm doing this now because there's a lot to engage with these days. Unfortunately, because tech companies don't care about our well-being, the burden of curating our experiences on social media falls on us, and the consequences of doomscrolling and falling for ragebait can escalate over time.

If you're dealing with anxiety, a low mood, and ruminating about the state of the world, it might be time to evaluate your engagement habits.

It's not just about your personal health, either. This is about community health. Viewing, commenting on, or sharing something out of anger tells the algorithm that this content is worth showing to others, and on Instagram, that usually means showing it to the people you're closest to first.

It might feel like you're spreading the word and raising awareness for an issue that other people need to know about.

But listen.

This is the exact misconception that social media algorithms rely on to keep people on the apps longer.

We've all heard about a little situation in the news these days regarding a certain comedian. I won't even bother naming the guy. A guy getting tons of publicity because we're angry about what he said? He's still pocketing that exposure and collecting fans along the way.

Let's think about what might happen if we all collectively stopped engaging with content about this topic. Because it's already in the news, right? People know about this. The awareness part has been done. If we ALL stopped engaging, that content would truly disappear. The comedian in question would become irrelevant if we kept it up. For a huge number of people currently thinking about this situation, what he said would become the last thing he said. Millions of folx would never hear about him again.

By avoiding the content entirely, we're also preserving good faith discussions only. Because at the end of the day, all this obsessive posting about a specific situation is just to get you sucked in and waste your time. It's not just about the topic dominating headlines at the moment. It's the system designed to distract you.

This approach should be taken before a guy like that becomes a sensation. Saying anything about a situation lends that person credence and importance. Mentions create relevance. Saying as little as possible about something you don't like does the opposite.

Using your attention to shape your media experience means more than just refraining from commenting. It's even beyond liking an opinion that you support. It means not even looking at the post, even if you agree with it. Engagement isn't just measured by the actions you take – apps measure engagement by how much time you spend staring at the particular image on your screen. Your attention is their currency.

Scrolling by quicker buries the topic faster.

It buries the post for the people Instagram knows you love the most.

It stops circulating the post to your extended network.

And it clears up brain space for you to breathe, relax, and hopefully get back into your body!

Boom. Irrelevance for those who deserve it and freedom from the doomscroll for you and your people.

With you as we stop the scroll,
Dana