How to protect your mental health?

Community Management and especially responding to hate speech is exhausting. So, please do not feel bad for prioritising yourself, and your team’s mental health over a response to hate speech.

It is further important to set boundaries and also distance yourself from hateful feedback and comments. There are several mechanisms that might help you, such as:

• Regulating yourself as feelings of helplessness and fears overwhelm you: You do not have to swallow your emotions, but in order to take back control, it might be helpful to use strong or physical factors to calm down. For instance, you can eat something spicy or cold (like an ice cube), touch a heater, smell oils or perfume, go outside, read a travel or recipe book… - anything to distract you from your current overflow of emotions.
• Positive thoughts: As you may lie in bed at night, worrying about better responses and struggling to fall asleep as negative thoughts are dominating your head, force yourself to come up with positive thoughts. So, for every negative thought, think of something positive as well.
• Safe space: If you feel stressed and overwhelmed, think of a safe space that you associate with calm and safety. Try to imagine yourself in this space for as long as needed to emotionally calm down.
• Actively put a stop to it: Once you realize that, once again, your worries and anxieties get the better of you, actively force yourself to stop thinking about it and introduce a whole new topic in your thought process. This is not easy and, especially in the beginning, you tend to go back to worrying quite fast – and that’s okay. Just stop yourself again. And again. And again. It will get easier.
• Use grounding techniques, such as the 5-4-3-2-1 technique, to shift your focus:
  - What are 5 things you can see? (look for small things)
  - What are 4 things you can feel? (e.g., how does your chair feel?)
  - What are 3 things you can hear? (can you hear birds or traffic?)
  - What are 2 things you can smell? (e.g. flowers or scented candles)
  - What is 1 thing you can taste? (get some chewing gum!)

 Choose safe and strong passwords

Data journalists recommend lengthy passwords and suggest using three or four random words that are not connected to each other as passwords. You might want to add some numbers or special characters, but it's more important to have long passwords than incredibly complicated ones. Never use the same password for different accounts; switch it up and use a password manager if you cannot keep track of all of them.

 

 Keep your privacy settings on

You should check on the different platforms whether you use the strictest privacy options. If not, do so as attackers and haters can work with the smallest bits and pieces of information. For instance: Make sure that your birth date, birth place or the city you grew up in is either not added on your profile or only visible to your friends - and no one else. Same with pictures and videos - and pay close attention as the networks sometimes change their settings and you have to actively select that you do not want your pictures to be available to the public. 

 

 Do a search of your name in relevant search engines

Do not just check the first page, but rather the first ten pages. Years ago none of us was careful with our data, so there might be old pictures and information on websites that we do not even remember we ever used. You can contact Google as well as website owners and ask them to delete your data. 

  

 Secure your data by enabling the two factor authentication (2FA) wherever possible.

It creates a second security layer in your login process. Signing into your accounts, you will use your usual password and in audition to that an additional code gets generated and sent to your device. Even if your password gets hacked, the two factor authentication makes it more difficult to get into your accounts. But even with this authentification you still should have secure passwords!

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Your apps, as well as other computer programs offer regular updates, which you should follow. Using the latest versions of your programs and operating systems helps benefit your online safety, as the latest updates usually contain better safety regulations.