When you hear the term “blessed images,” you might start imagining those sweet photos of flowers that your grandmother might send you on Facebook with messages like, “Have a beautiful day, my love! You deserve all the joy and happiness in the world!” And while those images are wholesome and heartwarming as well, today, we’re looking at a list that’s in direct opposition to cursed images.

The Blessed_Images subreddit has been around since 2017, but it has already amassed an impressive 81k members, thanks to the uplifting nature of its content. The group has one rule, that all posts must be wholesome, and it’s full of adorable puppies, sweet memes and images that might make you shed a tear of joy. 

While it’s incredibly easy to tumble down a rabbit hole of doomscrolling and focusing on the negatives nowadays, it’s important that we also take time to view some wholesome content as well. That’s why groups like Blessed_Images are so lovely. They allow us to escape from the bad news we’re bombarded with on almost every platform for a few minutes to relax and take some deep breaths.

According to Emily Torres at The Good Trade, we’re all actually craving wholesome things in 2023. She explains that we’re often exhausted and overwhelmed during this “decade that’s left nothing but holes in our hearts,” so enjoying a wholesome, home cooked meal or viewing a few hilarious, uplifting TikToks can relieve a bit of our tension and make us feel like ourselves again. 

Torres describes having a lack of wholesome-ness in our lives as being similar to having a nutritional deficiency. We may not notice at first that we’ve begun to live in a perpetual state of stress and sorrow, but over time, we’ll start seeing the impacts it can have on our health. By getting our daily dose of joy, laughter, relaxation and warmth, we can keep our wellbeing in check and remind ourselves that the world isn’t all bad. You might want to add Blessed_Images into your daily rotation of websites to check, after you’ve read the news and checked your email! 

We all know that doomscrolling can affect us negatively, as it can worsen anxiety and depression and can cause us to become more stressed, lower our quality of sleep and lower our self-esteem. So if you want to reduce the urge to get stuck in a negative loop, Caldwell Memorial recommends setting timers on how often you scroll each day. Many phones have options you can set to limit your screentime, and there are now apps that will count how many times you access your social media accounts a day, to remind you not to log on too often. 

It’s also wise to unfollow accounts that encourage you to doomscroll or take in negative content if you’re trying to keep a more positive feed on social media. Focus more on keeping active in real life so you have less time for mindless scrolling, and try to replace doomscrolling with more beneficial activities, such as yoga or meditation. And of course, surrounding yourself with others who have a positive attitude and will want to discuss more uplifting topics can be helpful as well.  

As for the benefits you can experience from taking in uplifting stories, Good News Utah says it can reduce your stress and anxiety. A 2016 study from the University of Southampton found that regularly consuming positive news can cause people to develop a more positive mindset and can counteract the negative symptoms that being surrounded by bad news can create.

Surrounding yourself with good news can also promote better interactions between yourself and others. Positive news stories have been found to bring people together, and there’s no question that it’s more enjoyable to discuss wholesome and uplifting stories than upsetting ones. We should still stay informed on what’s going on in the world, but taking a little extra time to find positive stories, rather than simply clicking on the first headlines you see, can certainly be worth it.   

Taking in positive content can also encourage individuals to spread even more joy. Reading an uplifting article about giving back to the community might inspire you to do the same. Seeing adorable posts about grandmothers being wholesome might remind you to call yours up or to bring her some baked goods and take her out for dinner. Positivity and negativity are both contagious, so let’s try to spread more of the former!

Are you feeling hashtag blessed after looking at this list, pandas? We hope you’re enjoying all of these wholesome pics, and please remember to keep upvoting your favorites. Then, if you’re interested in checking out some images that are the opposite of cursed, you can find Bored Panda’s previous articles featuring blessed images here and here!