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The wall between social media and reality
- Lauren Croud
- Apr 5, 2020
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 30, 2020
Social media – the cause of much controversy. Social media is vital for many reasons including; businesses purpose and to catch up with friends. However, reports have found a direct link between time spent online and detrimental effects to individuals’ mental health.
Online sites such as, Instagram and Facebook have proved to be increasingly competitive regarding how many followers and likes you receive on your photos. Hence, many online users feel the need to edit and photoshop their photos. This need to impress our followers becomes addictive, with brits checking their social media an average of 28 times a day. What many people are unaware of is how their false representations of themselves are creating devastating effects to individuals’ mental health, especially amongst teenagers.
Glamorous photos of ourselves or posts at the gym may be posted whilst simultaneously sitting at home in our sweats. But for your followers, the perception they receive is a ‘perfect’ life of people they follow and even envy, as we are much less likely to post our ‘low’ moments online.
Currently, there are slight movements with social media influencers posting bare face selfies and body positive photos. However, this slight shift is not enough to change the anxieties felt within individuals who feel insecure on social media. A question many ask is, if social media creates an impact to your mental health, why would you still use it. Statistics have found that many people still use apps such as Instagram and Twitter due to ‘FoMO’ (fear of missing out).
In a small experiment conducted by BBC Two, ten people were asked to scroll through 100 posts on their own feed and asked them how they responded to each post: positive, negative or neutral. Surprisingly, the majority response was positive. This was correlated with Professor Ensor Andrew Przybylski, from The University of Oxford’s, recent work, where he found that two hours spent on smartphones on weekdays and four hours on weekends gave a positive impact. However, durations longer than this spent on our phones, created an increasingly negative impact on individuals’ emotions. Time spent longer than 20 minutes in one sitting also created a negative response.
The Telegraph also released a report from a team at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland that followed this pattern. The study they reported on used 6,000 teenagers between the ages of 12 and 15. This, therefore, conducts that individuals can still use social media whilst feeling comfortable with what they are seeing, however, obsessive viewing for longer than 20 minutes at one time, can harmful effects to mental health.
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