Social media has a lot to offer us. It gives us the opportunity to stay in touch with friends we met on a trip, or maybe with our cousin who is off travelling the world.
It gives us a platform to find new information, follow people who give us inspiration and opportunities that we might not otherwise come across. However, it does have some worrying effects on our mental health.
We tend to misinterpret our friends’ lives for being happier and better than they actually are. This misconception can lead us to feel lonely and unhappy. We don’t tend to display negative emotions as publicly as positive emotions, particularly on social media. So what we see of our friends on Facebook is not an accurate portrayal of their lives, however, we choose to believe that it is. This only makes us feel worse about the current state of our lives. This happens with even the closest of friends who we might talk to every day. The illusion that everything is as it seems on social media can damage our self-esteem and general happiness. As well as that, we underestimate how much time people put into the images and statuses they post. We ourselves spend ages choosing a photo, deciding on a specific filter and what we’re going to say but we fail to understand that other people do the same thing. We fail to comprehend that they chose the best of what they had when they were posting and we take it at face value that their lives are the unflawed picture they are posting.
It can become an addiction. Social media sites like Facebook activates the brain’s reward centre. When we get a notification that someone has ‘liked’ a photograph or a status on Facebook, this reward centre is activated which makes us feel good about ourselves. The only problem with this is that we become addicted to this feeling of pleasure and we keep returning for more. This can affect our ‘real-world’ relationships as we choose to spare more time for news feeds and not enough for the friends who are actually in our company.
Facebook can make us feel lonely and/or depressed. Just being on Facebook is said to make us feel more connected with others and less lonely than people who are not on Facebook. However, what we do on Facebook can also make a difference to how we are feeling. For example, if you use Facebook to message friends, that is much different from creeping through people’s photos and comments. What is the difference between the two? Connection. If you are using Facebook to connect with others by playing a game, sharing information, you feel connected with people much more than if you are creeping through people’s posts. The less you participate in liking or commenting on posts the more likely you are to feel lonely. Just scrolling through your feed without engaging without the content can leave you with feelings of envy, resentment, loneliness and sometimes depression.
Posting selfies can make us selfish. There have been claims in the past number of years that young people are becoming more and more self-obsessed (particularly about image) and that they have more shallow friendships than generations before. Researchers have tested this and they found that people had a tendency to be shallower the more friends they had on Facebook than people who didn’t have as many friends but of the same age. Of course there are exceptions to this but this was the general rule that one team of researchers found.
Facebook can cause us to linger in the past. Dwelling on the past on what did or did not work out for us can bring up feelings of depression. Facebook stalking makes it harder to let go of the relationships that did not work out. We become obsessed with when they were last online or who has been commenting or liking their posts.
Facebook affects how we trust people. It can cause us to doubt our current relationships and friendships. Social networking gives us the opportunity to supervise our partner’s/friend’s lives from a distance. It gives us access to information that we may not otherwise know about, information that cause us to doubt them rather than trust them.
The message here is to proceed with caution as you scroll through your news feed. Social media can be a great tool if used correctly! It’s not all bad, but please ask yourself if it is affecting your relationships and/or your feelings of wellbeing. What steps can you take to be more mindful of your social media habits?
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