Comparisons to the perfect ‘Instagram Christmas can lead to unrealistic expectations and disappointment. That’s why Turn2Me, a national mental health charity, is encouraging people to reduce their social media usage over Christmas.
Social media can be very damaging for our mental health and deleting the apps from our phones, deleting social media accounts, or reducing the amount of time we spend on social media can have mental health benefits.
According to the Pew Research Centre, almost seven in 10 Americans use social media. A 2015 British study called ‘The Children’s Well-being 2015 publication’, found that “children who spent more than three hours using social networking websites on a school day were twice as likely to report high or very high scores for mental ill-health”.
The 2016 Journal of Adolescence found that “social media use in adolescence is associated with poor sleep quality, anxiety, depression and low self-esteem”.
Mind your mental health
The research is clear – social media can potentially be detrimental to our mental health.
What we see on Instagram is a very filtered and edited version of people’s lives.
People don’t put up the difficult, the mundane or the tedious parts of their lives on social media because it’s not as interesting, and people don’t want to wash their dirty laundry in public.
So, when we compare our own reality to the apparently perfect ‘Instagram‘ lives; it’s an unfair comparison because it’s comparing your life to the edited glimpse of someone else’s life.
Christmas can heighten this imbalanced comparison and make people feel even more dissatisfied with their own lives, because there are moments of celebration over the Christmas period for so many – people get engaged, move into their new dream homes, announce pregnancies, get or gift luxurious presents, and capture precious moments with close family members.
This isn’t reality. Most people have at least one dysfunctional or damaging relationship in their family, most people won’t mark the Christmas period with a life-changing celebratory event, and particularly with the rising cost of living, most people won’t be getting or gifting over-the-top luxury presents.
Social media
It’s important not to compare your own life to the lives you see on social media because it’s an unfair comparison – it’s like comparing your reality to what you see in an advertisement.
It’s not real, and that type of comparison can be really damaging to our mental health. Turn2Me is encouraging anyone who feels lonely, anxious, depressed, or stressed over the Christmas period to sign up for their free mental health services on Turn2Me.ie.
Social media can also lead to feelings of being left out or FOMO (fear of missing out). When someone sees a group of friends hanging out without them on Instagram, it can make them feel excluded and they might worry about what they did to lead to this exclusion.
Social media is also rife with bullying. A 2021 study on Indonesian elementary school children, published in the Frontiers in Psychology journal, found that “Instagram use was significantly correlated with developing separation anxiety. In particular, children demonstrated school avoidance when experiencing cyberbullying”.
91% of participants surveyed for a study by Ghada M. Abaido called ‘Cyberbullying on social media platforms among university students in the United Arab Emirates’ agreed “with the existence of online harassment in the form of cyberbullying on social media platforms”.
A 2021 study by Amanda L. Giordano at the University of Georgia found that higher social media usage rates, more hours spent online, and identifying as ‘male’ significantly predicted committing acts of cyberbullying in teenagers.
The bottom line is that social media has the potential to damage our mental health. If you don’t want to delete your social media accounts, try deleting the apps from your phone or reducing the amount of time spent on social media channels.
Turn2Me is running free ‘Christmas Blues’ support groups from December 25 until January 1, available on the Turn2Me website. Anyone who wants to avail of Turn2Me’s free, professional mental health services over the Christmas period can sign up on Turn2Me.ie.
By Fiona O’Malley, CEO of Turn2Me