Social Media And Mental Health
Social media may be one of the greatest unifying innovations of all human history, but there are still some extreme negative sides to it. It can affect your mental health. Most people use social media,it’s a fantastic tool. You can share your photographs, you can share blogs,anything personal to you can be shared. It’s fantastic to be able to identify and interact with similar people,or with friends and family.
The issue with social media starts to arise when we start to see people that are living the lives that we want. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with admire someones life or possessions. The issue is, this starts to produce unreal expectations of how you believe that your life is supposed to be. There are many people who are on there, taking pictures of lavish trips and all their cars, all the expensive possessions that they have. It can appear like they don’t really have any responsibilities in their life at all.
A majority of people who portray these images, don’t actually live that reality. We have to learn to not feed into the feed and what that really means is that we get caught up in whatever anybody else is doing. We wish we could be doing that we want, to be doing this, why can’t we have that, why couldn’t our parents have a lot of money? This envy and lack of gratitude for your life, just because someone is “seemingly” living a better life. Most of the people who are living the life you want, earned it.
So don’t envy their stuff, follow their work ethic.
We get caught up in looking for the updates looking for what’s new, who is doing what and it actually is an addiction. Depression and anxiety can also be linked just to social media alone. There’s a legitimate connection between social media and your emotions and i’d love to have you think for a second, how many times do you check your social media a day? Once, twice, four times an hour? There are some people who literally spend a majority of their day on their phone.
Best way to find out, go into your phone settings and actually check your app usage and you’ll see it’s probably a pretty staggering amount of time that you’re spending just on social media alone.
By no means am I bashing social media there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, it is the idea that social media is
a true portrayal of everyone’s life. On social media people post the best of their day, the best of their year, their favorite things. The visuals are gonna be a little bit tilted towards the side of unrealistic because life isn’t always the best, there isn’t always trips, there isn’t always buying expensive things for the majority of people. We really do have to take that into consideration when we’re scrolling
through these feeds.
Honestly the best practice is to check and see how much time you’re really using social media and using your phone and slowly try and cut that back. Being conscious is the first step of making a big change.
If you take anything away from today please enjoy the real world. Remember that everything on instagram and social media is not always reality. People are always posting their best and sometimes it’s altered with filters or photoshop.
Don’t be discouraged by what you see and if you see somebody doing amazing, use that as motivation.
