How Social Media Affects Your Mental Health
There are both advantages and disadvantages to using social media, but you need to decide how it affects you
In 2020 the world ended.
Or so, we, the people of the world thought.
With a bang, the Covid-19 pandemic had taken over the world and shut it down. For someone like me who didn’t have an iPhone or a smartphone, socializing in the real world was everything. Sure, I had a few hundred thousand followers online but now that I`d been forced to lock down and I, like many, had to turn all of my socialization online. Being honest, at that time, I wasn’t a person that would spend hours chatting online to people as I felt the presence of another person in real life gave me a better joy instead.
However, when the shock that was 2020 finished, I began to contemplate how social media can affect a person’s health.
I had previously published a chapter on mental health entitled ‘Selfish ‘Selfies’ or Selflessness?’ and answered the question on how many adults had become addicted to taking ‘selfies’, by posting them for nothing other than becoming popular online and how their future digital trace from their narcissism would judge their ability to be either selfish or selfless.
And I knew that many people were negatively affecting their mental health as by giving true service to others instead of seeking short term adulation was in short supply in the world.
Narcissism:
Strictly speaking, narcissistic people are known in how they treat their bodies in a similar way to how sexual objects are treated.
However, the ‘selfie’ generation had increased the attention so much on themselves that many wise definitions of narcissism believed that living in this way creates huge self negativity over the long run. Even by posing online, it can be a flirtation with the world. This can build eventual feelings of worthlessness, dejection, and contempt. This contempt can be for yourself and for others.
The Advantages of Social Media for Your Mental Health:
- Perhaps the most assuring thing about using social media as a way of communicating with people throughout a lockdown is knowing that most, if not all, of the world, is in the same boat as you,
- Social media allows you to reach out to positive people across the planet,
- It allows a person with mental health issues to learn and to connect with others that have mental health conditions too,
- Many talented and educated people are on social media and sell their services in this way. If you are seeking mental health advice or forms of therapy you can do it through social media,
- Social media can be a very quick way of contacting people that saves a lot of effort and stress on mental health.
The Disadvantages of Social Media for Your Mental Health:
- Social media can be highly addictive, and addiction is never good for mental health,
- Technology companies have refused to take social responsibility in the past for many people’s over-reliance on social media and this questions the long-term legal implications of various social media platforms in the future. The anxiety that this causes many people can be overpowering.
- In comparison to all other forms of communication, social media is still relatively young. The amount of research that has been completed on the long-term effects of social media and mental health is limited but growing. Although early research proves that there are many harmful effects of social media on people with mental health difficulties, it will take decades before the exact damage is really known.
- People can become over-reliant on social media and begin to put social influencers on pedestals in their mind. But, the reality is that not all social media influencers are role models, characters of worthy repute, or even qualified to speak in their space. This can mean that your perceived leaders are leading you astray and this can have very harmful effects on your mind.
Presence is the Present to your Mental Health:
There is no doubt that there are huge advantages to using social media. Trying to grow a business, learn, and discover are hugely important things in life.
Using the energy that we have to create new content is both a natural expression and a huge benefit to our world. However, we need to remember that social media is not being social. In failing to be social, and instead concentrating on your apps, you are draining yourself of another person’s natural presence. Aside from it being rude and possibly hurtful to that other person, it’s going against a natural need to connect.
For it’s in another’s true presence that we can read their energy, feel their emotions, and begin to understand the mirror of our true selves.
If we overly rely on social media, we are killing one of the fundamental human needs and this will toxify our mental health.
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