The daily noise of social media can sometimes make you want to turn down the volume. Taking a mental health break from your feeds is not new, but with images of war, destruction, and death, dominating the scroll, should you disconnect or.

Stay informed? It is okay to skip past the video. It doesn't make you any less sympathetic.

Hashtags on TikTok like social media break and delete social media, garnering millions of searches in recent days. Even Selena Gomers, the most followed woman on social media, announcing a brief pause saying, I've been taking a break from social media because my heart breaks to see all of the horror, hate, violence, and terror that's going on in the world. Though she's now back to posting, the need to step away is a feeling many can relate to.

You open Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, scroll down, see pictures of puppies, see pictures of your friend's wedding, and then there is their children and their horrible news about the disasters that are happening in Gaza. If there was a mass shooting somewhere, exposure a lot of times is unpredictable and uninvited.

Doctor Arash Javanbach is director of the stress, trauma and anxiety research clinic at Wayne State University. He says these images and emotions compound on themselves.

You get more and more and more of the negative about the other side and glorification of your own side, which enhances the division, enhances the fear, enhances the anger, exposure to horrible images can have even lead to symptoms of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder.

Last month, the Anti-Defamation League published a report citing a proliferation of hate speech online against both Muslims and Jews since the October seventh attack in Israel. For their part, the platform say they've taken steps to make the user experience less awful. Meta changing Facebook's default settings on new posts so only friends or followers can comment and made it easier to bulk delete comments. Tiktok is also making changes, adding opt-in screens for images that might be disturbing. And X, formerly known as Twitter, says it too has made changes in light of the conflict by improving its community notes on content, adding them more quickly to help provide context and combat misinformation.

Commenting and getting into fights over social media with friends is not activism, sometimes even a disease. Activism is doing things that might have a real impact on the lives of those that we care about or lives of others.

That's the path Celina Gomez has chosen. The star announcing her makeup company, Rare Beauty, will make donations to the International Red Cross in Israel and the Palestinian Red Crescent.

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