Social Media Sick
- Lisa-Ann Camille
- Feb 22, 2018
- 8 min read
Are we posting, sharing and liking ourselves to death?
"We are supposed to be slim, prosperous, happy, extroverted and popular. This is our culture’s image of the perfect self. We see this person everywhere: in advertising, in the press, all over social media. We’re told that to be this person, you just have to follow your dreams, that our potential is limitless, that we are the source of our own success. But this model of the perfect self can be extremely dangerous. People are suffering under the torture of this impossible fantasy. Unprecedented social pressure is leading to increases in depression and suicide. Where does this ideal come from? Why is it so powerful? Is there any way to break its spell?"
Will Storr, "Selfie: How we became so self-obsessed and what it's doing to us"
You are out at a birthday party. You are excited to greet your friends. But just as you start to have a good time, the compulsion comes over you to take out your phone, and order your friends to huddle together for a group selfie. You spend the next 10 minutes figuring out filters and hashtags for the post.
You made a resolution that you would start meditating every night before you go to bed. It's 11pm and you decide to jump on Facebook "just to quickly check something", and before you know it, it's 1am and way past your bedtime. "Oh well, maybe I will start meditating tomorrow night," you think as you roll over and doze off. In the back of your mind, you know the same thing will happen again tomorrow night.
You've been working out and eating well for the past few weeks. You're starting to feel good in and about your body. But as you do your daily scroll through Instagram you see selfies of girls who are thinner and in better shape than you. You look down at your belly and thighs ... Suddenly all you see is fat.
You have stepped out for dinner with your partner in a new outfit that you think looks amazing on you. As your partner says hello, you instruct him/her to take a photo of you. As you drive to the restaurant, you pause the conversation to post the picture. Halfway through the meal, you check how many likes the post has. If it's below the number you had in mind, you start to wonder if you really do look as good as you thought. You spend the rest of the night intermittently checking how many likes the photo has garnered - ducking in and out of the conversation with your partner. Your confidence rising only as high as the number of digital thumbs up.
If you were to characterise some of these social media behaviours according to a mental diagnosis, you find them dangerously similar to the symptoms of addiction. Addiction is characterised as "compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences", which is exactly what our current obsession with social media looks like. We jump onto social media searching for some kind of good feeling, but we end a session always feeling a little worse: our mood dampened and we can't shake the feeling that we've just wasted an hour or two of our lives. But we still go back, again and again. The authors of a review study from Nottingham Trent University which looked at earlier research on psychological characteristics, personality and social media use, concluded that “it may be plausible to speak specifically of ‘Facebook Addiction Disorder’…because addiction criteria, such as neglect of personal life, mental preoccupation, escapism, mood modifying experiences, tolerance and concealing the addictive behavior, appear to be present in some people who use [social networks] excessively.”
I started to question the impact of my social media habits on my own well-being. I noticed that I was often comparing my life to a fabricated ideal and was always coming up short. I could never truly be in a joyful moment without wanting to tap out to take a photo and post it. I needed people to like my selfies and posts and felt disappointed when posts did not achieve an arbitrary numbers of likes. It felt like I was running a race that I could never win. But the world tells me that running this ridiculous race is the norm.
The obsession with social media is so accepted that we are blind to the perilous impact it has on our physical, psychological and social well-being. I had long had a knowing that my social media habits were perhaps not serving me but I shoved the niggling under the rug. Recently the niggling started turning into a wound and I knew that I had to do something about it. My cataclysm came because I had recently started a new phase of my life where I was feeling particularly vulnerable. A few months prior, I had made the decision to cease pursuing full-time employment and go out on my own to start a business. Being bombarded by the shiny images of other people who were more successful than I was in business and/or had more followers on social media, created a raft of self-doubt and confusion in my mind about my own path. My self-talk was often harsh and belittling after a social media session. There were thoughts like, "Why haven't you yet made it like her?" "What is wrong with you?"
So when my Church suggested a community-wide 21 day fast, there was no doubt in my mind about what I would be giving up. Social Media had to go. So for 21 days, I refrained from posting on or scrolling through social media, limiting my activity to core business or community event posts. Therefore, instead of spending 2 or more hours on social media every day. I dropped to spending a few minutes a week. The well-needed break from my compulsive behaviour allowed me the time and space to reflect on the broader impact this societally accepted addiction has on physical, psychological and emotional well-being. I have boiled these impacts down into three main categories: Patchy Presence, Distorted Comparison and Mis-directed Validation.
It is the patchy presence that poses the most threat to our physical well-being. As I drive around Sydney, I see so many drivers on their mobile phones. In fact, "The NSW Government and the NSW Road Safety Centre said mobile phone distraction was a real problem, with nearly 39,000 people charged last year for using their mobile phone while driving." In July 2013, Audrey Dow was killed in Mackay, Queensland, Australia. She hit by a driver who was on his mobile phone. Driver distraction is a factor in two-thirds of crashes. Although driver distraction can include texting, dialling and reaching for an object et al, you can bet your life that people are also tweeting and posting on Facebook.
Distraction accurately describes what social media does to you. You literally exit a moment of your life to give your attention to your phone and to world that really does not matter. It seems like some people can no longer watch a concert from start to finish through their own eyes. They can't sit down to a meal without stopping to take a photo of it. On buses and trains, everyone has their earplugs in and their eyes down looking at their screens instead of at each other. We can't be fully with our friends, without our minds wandering to what we are going to post. We waste time trying to capture and share these beautiful moments to dictate a story about our lives, instead of actually being in our lives.
The article "Social Media and the Impact on Mental Health" states that in general Facebookers may tend to reveal good news positive stories. When these are compared to the viewers real-world experience which includes both positive and negative events/emotions, one may have the perception that one's own life is worse." This helps explain why, "overuse of social media was identified as causing anxiety and depression." As humans, we already struggle with the seemingly pervasive belief that we are not enough and we are not good enough. Social media can exacerbate that. Another study, "Facebook use predicts declines in subject well-being in Young Adults" states that the more people use Facebook, the less they reported moment to moment happiness and a life satisfaction."
Social media can snag us into the nasty cycle of distorted comparison. We want people to think our lives are amazing, so we post snapshots of specific moments that tell that story. Then we see posts from other people whose lives look like they are rolled in glitter. That person sees our post and think they are still not good enough and need to compete. This distorted comparison wreaks havoc on our self-esteem. Every day we willingly undergo the torture of comparing our achievements, possessions and bodies to glossy fabricated snapshots from others. I remember a few years ago when I was going through hell: I had just gotten fired from a job and was in financial hardship but I kept posting pretty pictures about my "amazing life in Sydney". Then one day an old friend of mine living overseas messaged how envious she was of me. I felt like a complete sham.
And what's up with our obsession with likes? Why do we feel validated when people like our photos or posts online when it does not have an impact on our real life. Getting a like is a fleeting momentary high, similar to what you get from a drug. It doesn't last so we need to get a hit over and over again. In 2016, 19 year-old Australian instragram It-Girl, Essena O'Neill publicly decided to quit social media because she would "measure her self-worth by the number of likes". "Social media isn't real," she said on her own defunct website, "It's purely contrived images and edited clips ranked against each other... And it consumed me." Essena had over a million followers across a number of platforms where she portrayed the image of the thin, happy, blond beach girl. Below is one of Essena's last posts after she had the epiphany of the impact but before she decided to call it quits.
Psychologists have a phrase for this. It's "contingent self-worth": where self-worth or self-esteem where self-esteem is based on approval from others or social companions. This of course exists in normal life but when people have an easily accessible tool to fabricate and propagate their identity, it becomes dangerous.
You might argue that I'm painting with a broad stroke and that there are a myriad of benefits to social media. (After all that is probably how you even came across this article.) I am not denying that those benefits exist but I am however urging self-awareness and caution. Taking a little break might do you good too. A 2015 study in Denmark found that "taking a break from Facebook has positive effects on the two dimensions of well-being: our life satisfaction increases and our emotions become more positive." During my 21 day fast, I had to intentionally restrain the compulsion to grab my phone to take pictures and post. But I also noticed something else. When I felt that compulsion, it was if I thought something negative would happen if I didn't post my moments right away. I got to observe that thought. Speak to it and tell it that it simply was not true. Self-awareness is a beautiful thing. I haven't done a personal post in 21 days and I'm still alive and well. I'm certainly surely a little bit happier - I feel like I'm getting to focus just on me. I haven't done a personal post in 21 days and I bet that nobody even noticed.
Comments