Mental Health Awareness Month is an opportunity to take time to check-in with yourself and raise awareness around the importance of well-being. From setting reminders to take breaks to leveraging your voice and sharing your experiences, we want to share Instagram tools to help you practice self-care and tips that inspire you to create meaningful content that resonates with your audience.

Supporting your well-being

We’re committed to creating a safe and supportive environment on Instagram and building tools to help support your well-being.

1. Manage who can interact with you. You can restrict, remove, or block followers. You can also choose to block an account and automatically block other existing accounts they may have or create in the future.
2. Stay in control of the content you see. You can delete and report comments or use hidden words to filter out specific words, terms or phrases from your comments.
3. Be mindful of the time you spend online. You can set a daily time limit or set a reminder to take breaks to help you manage your time on Instagram.
4. Reduce distractions when you need to focus. You can mute notifications and enable Quiet mode to help you stay focused when you’re not on Instagram and come back refreshed when you’re ready.

Creating Supportive Content

We partnered with leading experts in the well-being space to identify tips that can help you create authentic, supportive content.

1. Acknowledge and share. Acknowledge what your teen audience may be facing and share tips or advice on how you navigated these pressures, for better or worse.
2. Show, don’t tell. Teens need norms and cues about how to be, and who they could be as they’re developing their identities. They don’t always like being told what to do, but they like to hear what you did.
3. Laughter is medicine. Don’t underestimate the power of joy and laughter in dark times. Even when the topic may be heavy, it can be appropriate to embrace humor to land your message.
4. Share your truths. When you share the real struggles you’re going through, it helps illustrate that it’s common to face uncertainty and challenges. Some of the best content highlights a real issue that was faced and, importantly, the way through it.
5. Confidence is a process. It’s not enough to just say, “Build some confidence.” It’s important to underscore that it’s a process, and often one that’s non-linear. Share messages that show it gets better - but also that you need to have patience that it will grow, it doesn’t happen overnight.
6. Embrace the mess. Since life is messy, it is OK to remind your community that yours can be or has been too. It’s ok to share content that doesn’t feel stereotypically “perfect.”

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