2025 December 2 Take control of your social media feed

You can view the original Facebook LIVE here.

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me to talk about how to take control of your social media feed. Let's get started. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, send me a message.

This week we're going to talk about some simple steps that over time will improve the quality of what you're seeing in your social media feeds. Some days you just start off your day and you have a plan and things go according to plan. Kind of boring, but pretty peaceful.

Other days you have a plan, then eight or twelve inches of snow shows up, followed by rain, of course, and you get to have a free workout courtesy of nature. Now I could be upset about losing much of the day, or I could use it as a reminder that life and our plans are always evolving. I have an upcoming training conference, and one of the fun things about it is that people come from all over the world.

So when I'm tempted to complain that I had a multi-hour flight, there's a good chance that someone in the room had a multi-day flight in order to get there. Again, it's a reminder of why we should always try and look outside of ourselves and appreciate the things that we have whenever possible.

There are many good things going on all around us every moment. Yet there are challenges and some very bad things, but we have to remember to celebrate the good things and work to change the bad things. One of the areas where there have been many breakthroughs is in medical understanding of how our bodily systems are interconnected.

We've always had kind of a one-way, top-down view of how our bodies function. The brain was in charge and everything else followed orders from above—neat and tidy. But it made no sense, especially at the edge cases of things like responding to threats, which is almost instantaneous. Emotions, physical effects on the body, the gut-brain connection, the heart-brain connection, placebo effect, and much more.

Well now they're discovering that many cells emit light as they work, and even DNA may be a container for what are called entangled particles or photons. That would totally change how we view genetics and how genes even express themselves. It was also discovered that the heart, and now possibly other organs, has its own local memory. Not just simple functional muscle memory, but real event-related memory. There are numerous well-documented stories of major organ recipients, usually hearts, that emerged from surgery with things like new cravings and memories. Upon investigation, they found out that those were the memories and the cravings of the heart donor.

Additionally, the heart produces electromagnetic and magnetic fields separated from the brain's, and they're far stronger than the one from the brain. The magnetic field from the heart is detectable up to three feet away, about a meter away from the heart in all directions, and a hundred times stronger than the field emitted from the brain. And there's much more.

But the point is that we're often tempted to see all the troubles in the world and the greed in medical businesses and all those other negative things. But the other side is that even in medicine, which we all like to talk about, there are huge advances in knowledge being made every day. One of them was the discovery of a gene only published on November 3rd, 2025, by Mount Sinai—a gene called Cyclin A2 (CCNA2), a naturally occurring gene that helps the heart repair itself, possibly even after heart attack damage in humans.

Now, think about most of the things you read on social media. Were they talking about these things? It was some mindless daily meme flooding across the internet where people are arguing with each other about politics without taking even a second to try and listen to the other person, let alone understand their point of view.

Now, here's the amazing part. Almost all those medical things I mentioned, except for the heart gene, which I discovered while looking up confirming sources for the other ones, came from—ready for this?—my social media feed. The same algorithm or algorithms that feed more and more drivel to you when you seem interested in it will gleefully fill your feed with any other source of information if you show interest in that instead. All those stories came from Instagram and LinkedIn.

Notice that Facebook is not there. Honestly, at this point, I only go on Facebook to do stuff related to the podcast. Facebook's algorithms are extremely aggressive in trying to get you riled up and suck you in, and it actually is really kind of sad because I like to follow my friends on Facebook, but the aggravation that it causes me unfortunately just outweighs the benefit it brings to my life.

So on Instagram and LinkedIn, all those stories came from—my feeds are filled with stories about things like the war in Ukraine, written by people who actually live in Ukraine. People talking about circadian cycle management by actually living that way. People who talk about the benefits of lymphatic system activation by actually doing it, often by using either rebounders, little mini trampolines, or specific simple exercises. People researching different neuro-coaching techniques by reviewing newly published literature, sometimes by being the author of that literature, and much more. And the algorithm really doesn't care what it's sending my way just so long as I engage in it, and then it sends me more.

I mentioned this because we've talked about various corollaries of this in terms of you live a better life by asking better questions. When you ask better questions, that gives you a better life. Surrounding yourself with people who live life the way that you want to live your life, and of course, how to manage your response to life's challenges, your reactions to situations, and relatedly managing negative self-talk.

Now imagine instead of mindlessly doom scrolling, you actually engaged with every post you saw that you felt had value to you. I leave dozens of reactions every day on every post that interests me, along with saving those posts. Posts that don't interest me, I immediately scroll right past unless I find them particularly annoying or offensive, in which case I report them. Easy. Now my feeds are full of things that actually interest me and specifically not the things that do not interest me.

I also try to look at related topics when they come by so I don't end up in these little silos that the algorithm loves to put you in. On both Instagram and LinkedIn, especially if it's someone I engage with who reposts something from someone else, I'll often look at that other person's page and see what they're about and if they're connected with any other interesting people as well.

Does this take longer than mindless doom scrolling? Not really, because when you're just mindlessly scrolling, you usually don't find anything that's really engaging, so you're never really involved or satisfied, so you just never stop scrolling. In contrast, this morning, for example, I came across a secondary or third-level connection who had a very interesting discussion on the inherent lack of security in all current AI models and that this is a well-known and commonly discussed weakness with no simple solution in sight.

To me, that was way more interesting than some ten-second video of a silly situation. The AI video just wastes, like I said, ten seconds of my life and then the thrill is gone. The AI discussion, however, is not only material that I can share with you, but also helps me form a more balanced opinion when I read about how safe AI is or is not. The knowledge brings perspective into my life because I have a better understanding of the tradeoffs, and that perspective brings more calmness. And that calmness is what helps us to find peace and to focus on those activities that align with our life vision.

So like most things in our lives, we have a choice and our actions can influence the outcome. If you aren't happy with what you're seeing in your feed, stop interacting with them, or even report them. Search for things that do interest you. When something interesting comes along, always interact with it. Leave a reaction, write a comment, save it for later, forward it to a friend. Anything to let the algorithm know that you're interested in that item. And remember to check for other things that interest you so you don't become too one-sided or locked into a silo.

And be careful about taking the clickbait that comes by, especially for political topics. If I read something political, which is pretty rare, before I interact with that post in any way, I look for references. I read the comments and see if the post is even real. About half of them turn out to be made up, but because they got a lot of interaction, the algorithm spreads it far and wide. People see it had a lot of interactions, so they go to it too, and they like it too without even reading it, and they move on. And so it goes.

Simply be in control of what you read and be mindful of your actions. The algorithm really doesn't care what you interact with. If the only things you liked and loved were avocado recipes, pretty soon your feed would just be totally full of avocado recipes. So just like how you can control your reactions to a life situation, you can also control what you see in your feed to a large degree. We'll always see a few oddball posts. Yeah, they come by, but at this point in my feeds—both my feeds, like I said, Instagram and LinkedIn—I get surprisingly few off-the-wall suggestions and essentially no offensive suggestions anymore at all.

You really do have the ability to turn a mind-numbing experience into a fascinating, rewarding time that brings you knowledge, and more importantly, peace. How is that for turning around the effects of social media?

So enjoy all the new things to discover. Take back control of your social media feeds, and if need be, don't be afraid of walking away from a particular social media platform if it's not bringing you peace.

So that's it for the evening. Your homework tonight is to think about the quality of the things you see in your social media feeds, and if they bring you peace and knowledge or just work you up and make you tense and add stress for no purpose whatsoever. And just one little side note here: venting in a comment rarely has an actionable result. It doesn't move you to take action in some tangible way. You're just getting worked up over nothing.

Extra points if you begin to not interact with the posts that stress you, and instead search for topics that interest you and interact with those instead. You may be surprised at how quickly the nature of your social media feed changes.

So that's it for the evening. As always, remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. As always, UKR7.com aids to help the people of Ukraine, and WCK.org is the World Central Kitchen. Both of those are international sites, but local charities, local people—all sorts of things are going on, typically probably around you. There's also national things like United Way. There's lots of ways to help other people if you can.

But even if you're not in a situation or mood where you can do something for somebody as far as donating money or time, just a simple smile can change someone else's day for the better in ways you can't even imagine. So try and look outside yourself and see the rest of the world and make it a little better place if you can.

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you've found something interesting or useful, please pass it along. Please subscribe and hit the like button. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dream of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone, and see you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com.