Social media has radically changed our lives in a short amount of time. In little more than a decade, it’s allowed us to connect with people all over the world and to stay in touch with close friends. It’s become an essential tool for communication and for sharing lived experiences. It's literally changed the way we interact with each other.  But in that short time, it's also become all too clear that social media has its dark side too. Beyond the online trolls, social media can have a negative impact on our lives if we don’t create healthy boundaries between our on and offline realities.

Hayley is a social media influencer, blogger, and life-long academic, currently earning a Bachelor of Public Health. In this post, she shares practical ways to unleash mindfulness into your daily life.  I was first introduced to mindfulness in a third-year mental health class at my university. Everyone entered the room, found a seat, and did what most university students do when they enter a lecture hall — open their laptops, pull out their phones, and scroll through their social media feeds.

From real-time polling and quizzes, to live lectures viewed online from thousands of miles away, it's no doubt that technology has changed the modern classroom. But has it been for the better?

In this guest blog post, Britt from Tiny Ambitions shares six steps to quickly and easily unplug from tech in your every day life. 

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Finals alert! Here's some study inspiration 💡 At Flipd, we value balance — so if Instagram is what inspires you to get into flow, then all the power to you. On the other hand, if scrolling away on social media isn't inspiring you, it can be nothing more than a major time suck. So why not follow the best #Studygram accounts to get your thinking juices flowing? We've got you covered. >>> Download Flipd to stay focused <<<

In this guest blog post, Britt from Tiny Ambitions shares her three tips for staying mindful and present in a hyper-connected world.  Given how our digital landscape looks in 2018, it's not surprising that staying mindful and being focused is harder than ever. Our attention is constantly being hijacked — social media posts from friends and family, articles from bloggers and news outlets, and the latest Internet trends are all cloying for the small slivers of attention that we have left between our jobs, relationships and other life commitments.

In the fall semester of 2016, Syracuse University professor, Kivanç Avrenli, was teaching his statistics class and noticed something wrong with the picture. “I saw one student constantly on his phone,” he said, describing how the behavior got him thinking. “That student was wasting his time — he was wasting his investment. You’re there to learn, and he wasn’t learning.”

Flipd is a platform that helps reduce digital distractions and phone use during class. Not surprisingly, however, educators using Flipd have discovered that it can also help shape and change behavior well beyond the lecture hall. One such person is Dr. Alicia Drais-Parrillo, a psychology professor at Penn State University, who has been using Flipd with hundreds of students for the last three semesters and closely observing its impact.