Social media has impacted our daily lives since the late 1990s through the early 2000s. Each platform has created jobs, made memories, and brought new trends and fun experiences.
Social media has grown exponentially throughout the 2020s. This highly growing community has had a significant impact on the lives of the majority of the population. However, social media usage has also negatively impacted mental health as a whole.
Social media can be a very toxic community. Anything you post or say is in the world forever; sometimes, what you say can hurt someone.
“You can say something and have no idea about how that’s impacting someone else, and like, you can say something pretty hurtful,” Diane Moyer, Lakewood High School psychologist, said.
Another example of how social media can drastically affect mental health is the way lives are portrayed. Exploring the “perfect” lives of influencers online who frequently emphasize or exhibit unnaturally high beauty standards or excessive materialism can lead to insecurity and constant comparison from viewers.
“People present themselves in a certain way, and that might not seem real, right?” Moyer said. “And so somebody else sees that and compares that to their own reality and then feels really lacking.”
Portraying a perfect life is never needed to be happy, experiencing that privateness and having fun surprises of your own can also be wonderful.
“I don’t put pressure on myself to portray a perfect life online because my motto with my social is, I prefer to live more of a private life, just because I like the element of surprise and I’ll share things that are most meaningful to me,” Nicolina Steffen, founder of The Good Social Company, said.
Scrolling through life on social media tells you about new trends and updates on many topics and gives you personalized content customized to your liking. However, spending hours exploring videos can lead to loneliness, uneasiness, and anxiety as overexposure and comparison floods your mind.
“A feeling of emptiness, that you are now aware of all this stuff that’s going on, but at the end of your scrolling session you are left with, what? I’ve had all that input of other things going on and other people’s realities, and then what, like there wasn’t any real interaction,” Moyer said.
Stress is one of the main factors affecting the mind, especially from an influencer’s standpoint. Constantly having your life revolve around your phone and different apps can be tiring and overwhelming; staying up on all the new trending things can overstimulate you.
“With doing marketing for different businesses to me it’s super important to just constantly be attached to what the latest trends are, what’s the trending audio, that’s like the biggest thing, is just making sure that I am always staying up to date with the best practices that I can use for clients,” Steffan said. “I put a ton of effort into what I do professionally, I might not be doing a lot of things on my personal social media at one point because I’m exhausted, I just want to be off the app at that point.”
Although there are some negative impacts on mental health, there are also positives as well.
Growing your social skills, creating a platform with fun content, persuading people to get involved in new things, and trying amazing fun experiences. All this comes with social media, which can positively benefit your mental health.
“You can really create the strategy and the schedule that best fits in your life,” Steffen said. “You can really use your best creative outlet and influence people to support a local business, or you know get inspired by what you are doing.”
“Lots of platforms like TikTok, Pinterest, and Instagram can inspire people and their creativity with new ideas and show what they’re passionate about,” freshman Holden Dieter said.
Social media has a world full of excellent connections with people, it grows relationships, sparks friendships, and can develop a community that loves and cherishes everything together.
“It can provide a platform for connection, so people know about things faster,” Moyer said. “You can kind of reach more people in your network.”
“I feel like the connection, you can stay in touch with friends and family no matter how far they could be from you in like different cities or states, I feel like you can still just connect to your family and friends,” Dieter said.
Steffen also said, “On a client level the relationships I’ve had, I would’ve never met [restaurant owner Jessica Parkison] if it wasn’t for what I do and I would’ve never met so many people and built the network that I have, I genuinely love and appreciate every aspect of what I’ve created.”
Most importantly, social media is a fantastic platform to experience and grow to love. Some aspects of these apps can hurt and impact someone’s life drastically, but staying positive and pushing through is a wonderful thing to keep in mind!
