【Kali Hansa】

Remember when Facebook was a fun place to see cute baby photos?Kali Hansa And now it feels more like a sanitarium where everyone's screeching about the impending apocalypse? And scrolling through it knots your stomach and makes you feel like going to bed forever?

Turns out, there's something to all of that.

Consider how your relationship with social media's changed since President Donald Trump took office. It's no doubt helped you stay on top of each day's fresh horror unleashed by the guy elected to lead our free world, like the Muslim ban railroaded into place by executive order at the end of last week. Maybe it's helped you join—or even organize—some protests.

But social media's likely put you on edge, too. Depending on who you're friends with, the Facebook of today may feel less like a comforting place to stay in touch, and more like a triage unit, where everyone shouts their fears, frustrations, and arguments into the abyss. Or your face.

SEE ALSO: Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban’ could have doomed Apple

Confusion about what comes next—let alone the impact of what's already come to pass—is anxiety-inducing enough. To say nothing of reading through all of it."One of the things about anxiety is that it's fueled by uncertainty," said Dr. Ali Mattu, a psychologist at the Columbia University Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders. "On social media, you can get news from many sources at once hitting you in many different ways, depending on who you're following. That's one of the things amplifying the sense of uncertainty."

"It conditions you to treat everything like a crisis"

There's a bit of a cycle here, Dr. Mattu explained. The news makes you anxious. The natural reaction to that is a craving for information that clarifies that news cycle—ostensibly, to help you feel better. But the world doesn't quite work like that: Compulsively reading more isn't going to produce new answers, though it probably will work you into a lather, and thus, make you feel worse.

Clive Thompson, a noted tech writer who's long focused on how gadgets and social networks impact the way we think, agrees: the influx of information from social media can be intellectually and emotionally disorienting.

"Social media has a lot of the strengths and weaknesses of live television: It's great at emerging crises, but not as good at anything else," said Thompson. "It conditions you to treat everything like a crisis... I sometimes think there's an inherent crisis mentality that flows out of instant, of-the-minute updates."

The nature of how we get that information online plays a role, too. Facebook's News Feed is powered by algorithms that are designed to keep you scrolling, "liking," and commenting in an infotainment social spiral serving nothing more than your own anxiety. Twitter, meanwhile, simply serves to make every development feel like an earth-shattering event.

Or as Thompson put it: "The most recent information to arrive is treated as the most relevant."

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SEE ALSO: What to do when you're so overwhelmed by the Trump presidency you can barely move

And then there's the matter of interpreting tone over social media. There's a well-regarded study from a few years back, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, that found a lack of eye contact—more so than anonymity—contributed to less-inhibited, more-aggressive behavior online. Mix that with political freakouts coating every inch of your News Feed, and: Not a pleasant cocktail. But if you were to, say, have a face-to-face conversation instead, you might find things are a bit easier to deal with, or at least, empathize with.

"Maybe someone is talking about their fear of becoming a fascist state, and you see the sadness in their face," Dr. Mattu said. "That usually triggers a feeling of wanting to help."

So, how do you calm the heck down?

It's important to stay informed, but not at the cost of your mental health.

If you're feeling like you might mess yourself: Take a break. Set up specific times to check the news and social media. Instead of constantly updating your feeds, or scrolling whenever you have an idle moment, portion out parts of your day to get up to speed. Try it once in the morning, once around lunchtime, and once on your way home from work, for example.

There are more technical tricks, too. For example: Facebook Demetricator, a Chrome extension that removes most of the numbers from your Facebook News Feed. It doesn't change anything about how things are surfaced on your feed, but it frees you from interacting with content based on when it was posted or how many reactions it has—which you might find liberating.

For example, the first post is shown with Demetricator enabled: You can't see when it was posted (just "recently"), and it doesn't show you how many people liked it. The one on the right shows you every bit of data, perhaps inflating the content's urgency.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

You might also want to consider some tips from Time Well Spent, an organization dedicated to making technology fit better into human lives rather than the reverse. The group suggests turning off most notifications and keeping the biggest time-sucks—like social networks—in a folder off of your main screen. When you want to use them, type them into your phone's search function rather than mindlessly tapping the app icon—it lends a bit of focus to an otherwise reflexive activity. You might find yourself thinking, then: "Do I really want to dive into a flood of bad news right now?"

Recharging might actually help you fight the power.

Those who find current events disturbing and worth protesting shouldn't confuse these tips as encouraging complacency. Recharging, really, might actually help you fight the power.

"Constantly dealing with news and thinking of stuff can cause a sort of decision fatigue. And this is exactly what authority figures who want to render people helpless do—they actively try to flood the field with lots of controversies," Thompson suggested.

"That's become a lot easier to do with social media. The people will do part of it for you," he added.

Dr. Mattu agrees.

"The more anxiety you feel, the harder it might be to tap into that anger and promote whatever cause you believe in," Dr. Mattu said. "Some people believe that's often a goal of governments in political power who want to reduce protests—to keep you anxious and not give you an opportunity to get mad."

Take this all to mean there's a fine line between good-disturbed and bad-disturbed. Social media can and should spur action, but when it's having the opposite effect—forcing you to turn inward and feel assaulted by the world—it's time to tweak your routine. Also? Maybe turn off that caps lock, and try talking to someone in person.

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Topics Facebook Mental Health Social Media X/Twitter Donald Trump