How to mute your friends on social media – without losing them

What was the final straw that made your finger reach for the mute button? Was it the Instagram Story marking 100 days since your friend’s wedding (when they’d already posted consistently about it on every one of those 100 days)? The old colleague sharing yet another in-depth breakdown of their latest marathon time? A holiday humblebrag from the university acquaintance who seems somehow to have accrued a budget and an annual leave allowance to rival Dua Lipa?

We may not like to admit it, but for many of us, hitting the mute function on social media and on messaging platforms has become habitual: according to a survey from YouGov, 53 per cent of us have indulged in it. Compared to unfollowing someone, and thus unsubscribing from their updates in perpetuity, or leaving a WhatsApp chat in a fit of pique, it feels like a more manageable middle ground. You don’t have to roll their eyes at every fresh dispatch from their life, but you don’t have to cut them off entirely either.

And it can seem, too, like a victimless crime, one where no one gets hurt – surely your old uni friend isn’t going to realise that you’ve opted out of the constant stream of home renovation updates they’ve been sharing for the past five years? After all, if someone pulls you up on why your name hasn’t popped up in their likes or Story views recently, there’s always the failsafe excuse that you’re trying to spend less time on your phone, right?

In an “‘always on’ world”, when managing the flow of information that we receive can be tricky, social media muting “is a digital boundary”, suggests Susie Masterson, a BACP-accredited psychotherapist. In real life, she says, “we can regulate the amount of time we spend with our friends and family, but if we are constantly seeing them on social media, it can feel as though this boundary has been crossed”.

Psychologist Dr Carolyne Keenan agrees. “There can be quite a big difference between enjoying somebody in real life and enjoying having a constant stream of their thoughts, opinions, holidays, children and dinner choices delivered to our phone,” she says.

“In real life, friendships have natural gaps in communication. Social media removes some of those boundaries”. And while “we can’t control everything other people post”, she adds, “we can have some control over what we repeatedly expose ourselves to”.

Part of the problem is that sometimes there’s a dissonance between the person we know offline, and the person we view through a screen: we can like one while finding the other annoying. “Apart from the data overload, seeing family and friends posting on social media can be jarring,” says Masterson, “particularly if what we see doesn’t match our experience or model of their personalities. The reality is that we all have different personas in our professional and personal lives, but online personas are often less subtle.”

Sometimes, hitting mute is simply an act of self-protection. Emily* says that she ended up muting “a very close friend for about two years”, because she was also friends with someone who had started dating her ex-partner not long after they split up. “I didn’t want to have to see photos of them popping up in Stories or wherever, when I wasn’t expecting it,” she says, although she was sad to miss out on her friend’s cute posts of her young kids.

Sometimes a friend’s social media posts can play on our insecurities (Getty/iStock)

Comparison culture plays a big part too. When you’re all too aware that your life doesn’t look like that of your friends, seeing them enjoy everything you don’t have can be painful, especially when you can’t control exactly when or how those updates might float into your feed.

While navigating a break-up earlier this year, I found myself having to hit “mute” on updates from friends playing happy families. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about them, but that watching their seemingly joyous holidays and maternity leaves play out like a highlight reel when I was dealing with a lurching panic about whether I’d ever have kids was just making those downward spirals worse (I was, however, just a little bit paranoid that one of them might drop a major life update online, which I’d then fail to mention the next time I saw them in person).

“Social comparison is something humans naturally do, but social media gives us an enormous amount of material to compare ourselves against”, says Keenan – and to find ourselves wanting. “If you’re struggling with being single, infertility or your career, seeing friends’ engagements, pregnancies or promotions repeatedly might hurt even when you genuinely love them and feel happy for them. We can be happy for somebody else and sad for ourselves at exactly the same time.”

And, she adds, if we know that their posts “bring out a version of [us] that’s irritable, insecure or judgemental”, then reducing that exposure “may protect the real-life friendship rather than damage it”.

Hannah* has first hand experience of this – from both sides. When she moved to Spain in 2020, her Instagram Stories were filled with beaches and sunbathing while everyone back home navigated a lockdown that looked far more grey and miserable. When she returned, a close friend admitted that she’d had to mute her updates, “which I really get, because everyone’s putting up this perfect version of their life, and sometimes that can be really hard to look at if you’re not in a similar space,” she says.

In real life, friendships have natural gaps in communication. Social media removes some of those boundaries

Dr Carolyne Keenan

She would much rather that her friend pressed mute and saved the relationship, she adds, rather than “building this resentment of me to a point where it was irreparable”. Since then, she has “adopted her philosophy, where if I’ve noticed that I’ve started to get very jealous of one of my friends, I’ll just mute them for a bit, and usually I will unmute them in a couple of weeks and that feeling will be gone. It takes the sting out a little bit”.

But, she notes, this only works “if your friendship is strong”. If it’s floundering in real life, muting can be “the nail in the coffin, where you don’t want to think about them, look at them or interact with what they’re doing – you just want to usher them quietly away into this muted space to give yourself some peace”.

If a friendship has strong foundations, it can probably survive a muting spree (Getty/iStock)

In a scenario like this, muting might just be a way of “managing the symptom rather than the underlying issue”, says psychologist Dr Ravi Gill. So before hitting that button, she recommends that you “get curious about your reaction, rather than judging it. Ask yourself: ‘What exactly am I feeling when I see this? Is this about them, something happening in my life, or something unresolved between us?’ Sometimes the answer will be to have an honest conversation. Sometimes it will be to work on our own comparison or insecurity.”

And if you have an inkling that someone has opted out of your own (definitely not at all annoying) digital updates, what then? Keenan “wouldn’t immediately assume there’s a problem”. After all, she says, “we have no automatic right to somebody else’s attention online”. And “if they’re still warm, engaged and present with you in real life, I think that’s much more important”.

But, she adds, “if muting appears to be part of a wider pattern” offline, where they’re “withdrawing, not responding or behaving differently towards you”, that’s when it’s “worth asking whether everything is OK”. Ultimately, she says, “the health of a friendship probably isn’t best measured by whether somebody watches your Instagram stories, but how you actually show up for each other”.

*Names have been changed for anonymity