3 Tips To Make Instagram More Motivational & Less Harmful To Your Health

Instagram can be a really good social platform to gain loads of inspiration. Particularly, it can help you find fitness and wellness motivation that encourages you to improve yourself. The big elephant in the room is that it can also do the exact opposite!

If you’re not careful, your Instagram feed will become extremely damaging to your mental & physical wellbeing. You start seeing loads of models on your feed who promote harmful lifestyle ideas and make you feel bad about yourself. So, what can you do to make Instagram more motivational and less harmful? Here are three simple tips: 

Follow real people

Avoid following celebrities or high-profile fitness influencers on Instagram. There are some really good ones out there, but too many have been taken over by commercial greed. It’s easy to spot the ones we’re talking about as they try to sell you things like weight loss teas and all their photos are heavily edited. 

Instead, try following real people. Look at the fitness hashtags and you will quickly come across people that look like you and are on their own fitness journey. Seeing real people go through changes will help you become more motivated as they represent a more realistic expectation for yourself. 

Look for educational content

Instagram can be an excellent source of information, especially from a fitness/wellness perspective. There are lots of accounts that provide you with really great educational content, such as exercise tutorials and workout videos. Someone like Kayla Itsines is a fantastic example of this! She’s an absolute fitness babe who has loads of cool videos on exercises and workout routines. Following her content is a brilliant way to feel motivated as she gives you ideas on what to do in the gym – and how to do it. 

You will find other profiles like this on Instagram, so start following them to flesh your feed out with more educational stuff that inspires. Look for accounts that post educational content surrounding things like nutrition as well – this can really help you learn good habits. 

Block harmful accounts

You know those big fitness accounts that promote stupid supplements and unhealthy lifestyle choices? Unfollowing them is a great starting point, but to truly cleanse your feed you must block them. 

Blocking these accounts will ensure you don’t see their posts on your recommended page or popping up on your feed. The annoying thing about modern Instagram is that you constantly see posts from accounts you don’t follow. The app is trying to recommend accounts that fall under your interests. So, if you’re interested in fitness, you’ll see loads of the big fitness influencers popping up. Sure, you can find some good ones, but you’ll mostly see the bad ones. Block any accounts that don’t spread good messages and they won’t appear on your feed again!

Follow these three tips and you will see improvements in your Instagram feed. It will stop being a harmful place that makes you question yourself and how you look. Instead, it will be something that provides positive motivation to help you explore your fitness journey.