Ways Social Media Affected My Mental Health

Lessons learned from a negative relationship with social media

I have a love-hate relationship with social media.

I used to love sharing my life on social media and as much as I told myself that I was sharing things for myself, I noticed that I was getting caught up in the addiction and observed a shift in my mood; not in a good way.

There is so much information out there about how social media affects the mental health of its users and I could see this taking a toll on me too.

So much so that I turned off my notifications and barely used it at one point.

Now that I have created a page to showcase my art so that I can eventually sell my work, I have found myself using social media again, but this time I want it to be different.

I don’t want it to affect me in the same negative way it used to in the past.

There were certain effects I noticed when I was an avid social media user that were detrimental to my mental health. Here are just a few.

Did I even do it?

I got into the mindset of “if I don’t post what I am doing, did I even do it?” It was such a silly mentality to have yet it was something I always felt the pressure to do.

I had this need to show off what I was doing and felt like if I didn’t let the world know what I was up to I would seem boring and that whatever I was doing, wouldn’t count if people didn’t know I was doing it.

Lesson Little did I understand that people just don’t care.

It was actually very self-centered of me to assume that people bear me in mind when they are on social media and are thinking, “Aarti didn’t post today, what a boring day she must’ve had!”

I don’t think this of other people, so why would I assume they would think this of me?

I knew that I had to unlearn the habit of needing to share everything I did because I am not doing things just to post about it, I am doing them for the sake of doing them, and for myself.

Comparison

This is something that I believe is relatable for a lot of people, and as much as I know that comparison is not healthy, it didn’t make me immune to it either.

I would see people who had accomplished so much or had a larger following, and were more successful or were having “more” fun and would allow myself to feel inadequate.

I used to get so down about this and sometimes I still do.

Lesson I have to always remind myself that comparison is not healthy especially if it has me questioning my own abilities and self-worth.

We are all on our own unique paths and our journeys come in different shapes and sizes.

My version of happiness and success may look vastly different from someone else's, and that is more than ok.

Fakeness

One of the main things about social media that I actually despise is how easy it is to be fake.

People are faking their lifestyle, using apps to edit their body shape, and are preaching things that they don’t even believe in, just for likes and brand deals.

I have seen people from my own life who have created an online persona and sold this side of themselves to the world when their actual personalities are the complete opposite.

I even have friends who post about living their best lives when in reality they are telling me how dissatisfied they truly are.

Lesson This is why I have curated my feed to only show me things that I find inspiring and that I know to be true so that I am not flooded with a barrage of inauthenticity.

I had to brutally cull things from my feed because I value my mental health more than seeing things that were just not true.

Unattainable

In a similar vein to social media being used for inauthenticity, there are people who go out of their way to create a sense of unattainability because they want people to feel like they are living a life that no one else can reach.

I used to think I found this inspiring, but in reality, it only made me feel like my life was full of lack.

I started to want things that I didn’t really need because I thought they were necessities if I wanted to live a certain way.

I also allowed myself to get swept up in the goals and dreams of other people and convinced myself they were my dreams too, even if I didn’t resonate with them.

Lesson I learned to cut this type of content out of my life because they were influencing my own personal goals and I became too consumed with chasing others' pipe dreams instead of my own.

This comes back to the fact that all of our goals in life are different, and true satisfaction does not come from chasing something that is being forced on me but from following what is in alignment with what I actually want from life.

Despite the negative impact social media had on me, it taught me valuable lessons about the world we live in and myself.

It is my social media account, and it's up to me what I allow into my feed.

Sure the algorithms come into play too, but I learned to cultivate a feed that wouldn’t negatively impact me when I decided to log off.