Unit 1 Taking Charge of Your Health and Wellness Copyright Goodheart-Willcox Co., Inc. 18 Social Environment The people around you make up your social environment. Your social environment may include family members, friends, peers (people similar in age to you), teachers, coaches, and neighbors. The people you interact with on social media sites are part of your social environment, too. The Power of Social Media to Inspire How often do you spend time on social media sites? What kinds of messages do you receive in your online social community? Do the people within your social media network promote positive, healthy behaviors or negative, risky behaviors? Social media can be a powerful tool to inspire healthy behaviors. It can also influence you to engage in risky behaviors, such as tobacco or alcohol usage or sexual activity. Just as peer pressure from your friends and classmates can impact the decisions you make regarding your health, so can the content you view on social media. If the social network you see daily promotes negative, risky behaviors, you may feel pressured to engage in these behaviors too. For example, if your online friends are always posting mean comments to others or participating in hazardous viral or online challenges, you might think you need to do this too in order to fit in with the group. Pay attention to how these posts impact the way you might think about risky behaviors. Carefully choose who you follow on social media based on how their messages could impact the way you view your own health and wellness. Surround yourself with a social network that cultivates a respectful, safe, and overall healthy lifestyle. In addition, inspire others to live this kind of lifestyle too, through the content you post on social media. Inspire a Healthy Life In this activity, you will create an inspiring digital representation of a social media post that encourages a healthy behavior. The materials you need depend on how you want to create your visual representation. You may choose to use a social media template or a paper representation using poster board or construction paper. To create your digital representation, complete the following steps: 1. Identify a healthy behavior that is meaningful and relevant to you, your classmates, or your friends. Topic examples may include green living, healthy eating, tobacco-free living, or physical activity. The healthy behavior you choose should positively affect a person’s physical, mental and emotional, or social health. 2. Create a representation on the social media platform of your choice to raise awareness of this healthy behavior. Your digital representation may include infographics, pictures with captions to illustrate this behavior, famous quotes, and a hashtag or other link to a larger health community. Add other details as needed to make your representation inspiring, informative, creative, and visually appealing. 3. With permission, display these social media healthy posts around the classroom or throughout the school to inspire your peers. You may also want to post your message on a social media site, with permission, to get feedback from your online social community. BUILDING Your Skills Astrovector/Shutterstock.com