Social Media and Mental Health
No matter what you did on your phone today, no matter how long or short your screen time is today, it is likely that one or more platforms of social media were involved. Research shows that 77% of all Americans use social media. Despite such fame, is social medial all positivity? — Certainly not.
As a college student in her 20s, I myself have always felt like social media only made me more depressed. Amid all the cute doggie pictures and funny memes that I enjoy seeing on Instagram, it is impossible not to notice how some people are out there living their best lives. And by best, I mean the best. Every Instagram influencer is so thin and tall, young and rich, has beautiful hair with the perfect body figure, and is in the sweetest romantic relationship. It almost feels like I am the only middle-class citizen who does not fly to Paris just to eat a baguette, the only boring tween who does not attend Coachella every year, the only nerdy student who actually studies the night before her exams. I cannot help but continuously be discouraged over how dull my life seems compared to theirs. Don’t worry; I just want to assure whoever is reading this that I am not depressed, and my mental health is perfectly fine.
But imagine how the same contrast would be perceived to someone who is suffering from chronic depression. The disparity between their life and what they see on social media certainly would not be any help for their mental health. If anything, it will make it that much harder to love themselves the way they are. And that is exactly what studies show: teenage and young adult users who spend the most time on social media were shown to have a substantially (from 13 to 66 percent) higher rate of depression than those who spend the least time.
You may want to believe this result represents only a correlational, not causal, relationship between social media usage and depression (perhaps because you feel guilty about your social media usage?). However, a very recent experiment from 2018 found less social media use led to better well-being. In the study, the experimental group had to restrict their social media use to 30 minutes a day for three weeks, while the control group continued their usual social media habits. At the end of the three weeks, the experimental group showed better mental health outcomes compared to the control group, indicating that limiting social media decreases loneliness and depression.
We all know what FOMO is. Fear of missing out; our human desire to belong to a community; our neediness to be caught up with everything that’s going on in the world — we have felt it before, and we have acted upon it before. How about, just for this weekend, we put down our phones, stop being afraid of missing out, and actually live life?
