During Eating Disorder Awareness Week there is a lot of focus on the eating disorder itself. Pieces on what’s it’s like to have one and helpful tips to aid recovery. This is all great.
I’m taking a different approach. Many pieces highlight the roles that self esteem and peer comparison play in eating disorders development. So I’m writing about the part social media plays in influencing self esteem and peer comparison. I’ll leave the connection between the three, to you.
Social Media can and does affect your mind and our mood. Fact. Don’t believe me? Give up social media for Lent and see how long you last before you turn into a grotty horror zombie or maybe you’ll feel ten times better.
When I was in secondary school, social media didn’t exist. I’m 28 now, my childhood was spent playing POGS or Red Rover and watching ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel Air’. I’ll be bold and say my formative years came free of the ways social media can hurt self-esteem. But by the time I was in college, Facebook was a big thing, and pretty quickly everyone had smart phones and there were too many social platforms to keep up with.
This new wave of socialisation brought with it pressures, a desire to look good online and to come across as entertaining and interesting (things that people might find tough to display in face to face social interaction). But with time to record, edit and Photoshop status updates and Insta’s, it appeared to be easier to put ourselves online with an appearance of a life and look that was ‘socially ‘cool’.
10 years on and social media has blown up, as have the pressures it brings. Now, not only do we aim to look good and come across as entertaining, but we also have to be good at things and appear to be having a successful and exciting life.
It appears that now, more than ever, people are so interested and invested in their appearance. The amount of body ‘forms’, ‘flaws’ or ‘#glutegoals’ that exist is impossible to keep track of. The variety of ‘physical flaws’ people are creating to be conscious of is rising and we are all becoming Inspector Hatchett’s of our own photo’s.
It seems like other people have cuter pets, nicer homes or cooler holidays, but that is because those are the only things they ever post. So a really important question to ask ourselves when we are looking through our newsfeed / timelines is ‘what does this person look like in real life and how much of their daily life are we actually seeing?’
We don’t take into account that a lot of what we view, from friends photo’s of nights out to Cara Delevingne on the red carpet, are pictures which are meticulously planned and edited. It is easy for a ‘follower’ to assume that the person they are ‘following’ (whether it be a sports professional or a childhood friend), is living this amazing life and looking this great all day every day. But, in reality, what the follower is seeing is just a small sliver of someone’s life, which, more often than not is heavily embellished. With this comparison, we end up comparing 100% of our life to 5% of someone else’s life. But still, we see those smiling selfies with perfectly groomed hair and forget that there were probably 20 shots before that one that looked like a sneezing walrus or something equally unflattering. We need to stop comparing our lives to the snapshot edited highlighted versions of someone else’s life.
Theodore Roosevelt once said ‘Comparison is the thief of Joy’. If you are on social media, you are probably comparing yourself and how you look to what you are seeing on your newsfeed. The more often you are on social media, the more you are going to be comparing yourself.
Social media attention means ‘I am worthy’.
To a lot of people, the amount of likes, followers or views received is equated with self approval or self worth. ‘Gigi Hadid has 1 billion followers, I have 47, I am not worthy’… ridiculous right?
If you find yourself feeling stressed, anxious or having negative thoughts after using social media, it may be time for a break. I know it seems like crazy talk, but unplugging once in a while is a great way to get back in touch with who and what you are and what makes you great. Because seriously, you’re great.
I often talk to people like my colleagues, friends or family and they all have similar opinions!
‘I hate it, but I am bored without it’.
‘It is annoying but it is the only way I can keep updated on the news and on gossip and this is the stuff that me and my friends talk about’.
‘I always come off social media, seeking to improve one area of myself or my life’.
I think it would be entirely unrealistic to ask anyone to become completely withdrawn from the world of social media. But, if after reading this piece, you think your self-esteem is being influenced negatively by social media, try to remember that what you are viewing isn’t an appropriate representation of real life. We need to deal with healthy usage, understanding and management of our own social media. It’s hard to avoid but we can learn and prepare ourselves for what we will inevitably encounter online.
Try to start monitoring your usage (how much time do you actually spend on social media… could you do something more important like, I don’t know, look out the window at a bird?! Anything is more important than looking at an Instagram wishing one of your parents could have been Swedish so that you would have more muscle definition in your genes.
Unfollow specific pages, people or accounts that make you think or feel negatively about yourself. Seriously, taking a step back from your life according to social media will help you to become more in touch with and less judgmental of who you are as a person. At the end of the day, during our lifetime, we spend the most amount of our time with ourselves, we might as well get to know and love the person we are!
Check out Fiona’s If you want to recover from an Eating Disorder video below.
Support information:
- BodyWhys Ireland
- The Samaritans – Tel: 116 123 or email: jo@samaritans.org
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