The Dark Side to Social Media

Source: B&T Magazine

It’s difficult to think of a time where social media wasn’t a mainstay in our lives. From Facebook to Instagram and Youtube. There are a variety of platforms to document our lives for the rest of the world to see. While this has been a positive addition to the lives of most, there is a dark side to social media.

The need to be relevant has risen in the last few years. No longer content with normal life, millennials have taken to perfectly curating their feeds to showcase life of luxury, excess, and fun. All for the sake of gaining clout. Social media is the modern-day schoolyard and we are all striving to be the popular kids.

We equate our number of followers to our level of worth and the amount of likes we receive as peer approval. Social media has provided us the means so seek unlimited approval from our peers. But at what cost?

A study undertaken by University of Pennsylvania took 143 students and randomly allocated them into one of two groups.1 low social media usage group and a high social media usage group. The results were alarmingly clear. The group exposed to higher social media users reported greater feelings of loneliness and depressive symptoms.

What can we do to help

Eliminating social media from our lives is not practicable for the world we live in today. So, we need to devise ways to live a balanced life, accepting social media for the role it plays. Help Guide2 suggests we can live in harmony with social media by implementing the following:

  • limiting the time we spend online each day; 
  • changing the things we focus on when online; 
  • making time for friends offline; and 
  • being grateful for things we have in real life.

By incorporating the above points into our daily lives, we can create a healthy and balanced relationship between life and social media.

    1 Mammoser, G. The FOMO is real: How social media increases depression and loneliness. Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health-news/social-media-use-increases-depression-and-loneliness#Does-social-media-cause-depression? 9 December 2018↩
    2 Robinson, L and Smith, M.A, M. Social Media and mental health. Help Guide. https://www.helpguide.org/articles/mental-health/social-media-and-mental-health.htm Last updated: January 2020↩

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