What Are You Feeding Your Mind?

The book beside me hasn’t moved, but somehow I’ve watched a woman lip sync to a song I’ve now heard seventeen times.

My thumb keeps moving. Someone is arguing with a stranger. A video ends before I understand what it was about, so I watch it again. There’s a 20 something year old giving relationship advice, a terrible opinion, something I almost send to a friend. I check the time at the top of my screen and do that little calculation I’ve become far too familiar with. How long have I been sitting here?

Long enough that I could have read a few chapters. Written the paragraph I’d been thinking about earlier. Taken my camera outside before the light disappeared.

Instead, I’m sitting in the same position, with a warm phone in my hand and a head full of things I never meant to spend my evening thinking about.

And the funny thing is, social media is my job.

I create content. I edit videos, write captions, post, and help manage someone else’s page alongside my own. I’m constantly on these apps, paying attention to what people are watching, what they’re responding to, what makes them stop scrolling. Sometimes I open Instagram with an actual purpose and, somewhere between checking a post and looking for inspiration, forget what brought me there.

It’s hard to know when the workday ends when the place you work is also the place you go when you’re bored.

I’ll finish editing something, post it, answer a few things, and then stay. Just for a minute. Except now I’m no longer working, and I’m not really enjoying myself either. I’m just there, watching whatever appears next.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how much of my life happens in that space, and how I want to feel when I leave it. Because if I’m going to spend so much time on social media, I want some of that time to give something back to me. I want to feel curious. I want to discover something beautiful, learn something, remember an interest I’ve neglected. I want to put my phone down with an idea I’m excited to try.

I’m tired of leaving it feeling drained.

Don’t get me wrong. Send me a funny animal video and I will absolutely watch it, probably more than once. I enjoy being entertained. There are days when laughing at something ridiculous is exactly what I need. But there’s a difference in how I feel after a good laugh and how I feel after an hour of watching things I barely chose to watch.

I’ve started noticing that difference. I’ve also started noticing what I’m letting pass through my mind just because it happens to be on a screen.

As I’ve grown closer to God, some things have become harder to casually sit through. Conversations I don’t want to participate in. Things that leave me feeling anxious, distracted, or pulled toward a way of living that doesn’t line up with my faith. Sometimes I catch myself watching and think, I don’t even like this. Why am I still here?

I don’t want to be careless with that question anymore.

What I give my attention to follows me after I close the app. It shows up in what I think about while I’m getting ready, what I worry about, what I suddenly feel I’m missing. I know how easily a few minutes online can change the way I feel about a perfectly good day.

But I also know it can make me want to create something. It’s happened before.

When I first got into film photography, I could spend so much time studying everything about film. I used social media as a learning tool. I studied different film stocks, how to develop it, the best film cameras to use and followed photographers who inspired me. It made me curious and excited to pick up my camera.

That was the part that mattered. I took what had caught my attention and let it lead me into an experience of my own. I made photographs that didn’t come out how I hoped. Tried again. Learned what I liked. Eventually, I began recognizing something of myself in the pictures.

Looking at someone else’s art had helped me find my way toward making my own.

I’ve been feeling that again with writing.

I started following writers and taking the time to actually read their words. Sometimes I’d come across a sentence and linger there, rereading it because of how precisely it described something I’d felt. Other times, someone would write about an ordinary moment so beautifully that I’d find myself paying closer attention to my own day.

The quiet in my home. The thoughts that come while I’m walking my dog. Something I remember while making dinner that suddenly feels worth writing down.

I began wanting a place for those things again. And little by little, I started writing.

Now I’ll catch myself working through a paragraph, moving a sentence around, trying to find the words that sound most like me. I’ll look up and realize I’ve spent an hour making something instead of watching things disappear up a screen. There’s a satisfaction in that I had missed.

Reading has been finding its way back into my life too. Someone mentions a book, shares a passage, talks about why it stayed with them, and I get curious enough to open one myself. I love that a little glimpse of someone else’s reading life can lead me into an entire world I might never have found.

All of this has made me want to be more deliberate about my feed.

I’ve started thinking of resetting my algorithm as an ongoing choice about what I want to make room for. I can look for the people doing things I’m curious about. Follow the writer whose work makes me reach for a notebook. Spend time with the photographer who makes me want to go shoot. Move past the content that consistently leaves me feeling worse, even when curiosity makes me want to stay.

And I can ask myself a question before I disappear into another evening of scrolling: What would I actually love to see more of?

Maybe for you it’s cooking. You want to learn how to make a meal you’ve never tried, something that fills your kitchen with a smell that makes you impatient for dinner. Maybe it’s gardening, and you’ve been wanting to grow something on the little patch of space outside your door. Maybe you miss drawing. Maybe you want to understand your faith more deeply, read poetry, learn a language, or finally do something with the camera sitting in your closet.

Go look for those things. Give those interests a little room in your day. Find people who make you excited to be a beginner.

Pay attention to how you feel afterward, too. Does watching them make you curious enough to try? Do you leave with an idea, a question, a desire to learn? Or do you find yourself feeling smaller, convinced everyone else is already so good that there’s no point in beginning?

You’re allowed to be thoughtful about who gets that much access to your attention. You can appreciate someone’s work and still decide you don’t need to see it every day.

Of course, I can fill my feed with beautiful, thoughtful things and still spend the whole evening scrolling. I’m very capable of saving forty ideas and attempting none of them. Somewhere in my saved folder are probably enough projects to keep me occupied for the next several years.

So I’m trying to notice the moment when I have enough inspiration to begin.

Social media will still be part of my work tomorrow. There will be things to edit, captions to write, posts to check. I don’t expect to stop spending time there, and there are plenty of things about it I love. It has introduced me to artists, new friends, ideas, and ways of seeing that have become part of my life.

I just want to be more aware of what I’m doing with that access.

So, what if, instead of endlessly consuming whatever showed up, we started looking for the things we genuinely wanted more of?

Maybe it’s worth taking a look at your feed today. Not just at the people you follow, but at the things you keep stopping to watch, the things you save, and the things you return to when you have a spare moment.

If your algorithm is a reflection of what you give your attention to, what is it teaching you to pay attention to?

And more importantly, is it feeding the parts of you that you want to grow?