We often think of social media as a harmless tool for connecting with people and expressing ourselves. We use it to share updates of our personal and professional lives. We use it to stay in touch with loved ones. We find helpful quotes, insightful articles, and uplifting material online. For many of us, though, social media can actually be very detrimental to our mental and emotional health. It can increase our stress, anxiety, and depression. When struggling with addiction, our drugs of choice are our go-to ways of coping with these emotional challenges. Can social media exacerbate our addictions?
Toxic Positivity
When social media is toxic for us, we can find ourselves feeling emotionally overwhelmed and isolated, even though it’s meant to be a way to connect with people. This is because we can feel hesitant to share our emotional difficulties online, to reach out to people when we’re struggling, and to be honest about what we’re going through. We feel pressure to post only positive things about ourselves. For example, we want to update our networks when we get a promotion at work, not when we’ve lost our job. We want to tell people we’re happily married, not that we’ve recently gotten a divorce. We want to post photos of ourselves that make us look confident, self-assured, and happy. We don’t usually want to reach out when we’re feeling insecure and down on ourselves. We don’t want people to know we’re suffering. We don’t want to appear weak, negative, or depressed.
Emotional Suppression
Social media, therefore, can be another tool for emotional suppression. We’re not being honest or transparent about what we’re really feeling. We’re blocking and burying our feelings in order to appear happier or more confident than we actually are. We often will use our drugs of choice to assist us in suppressing, ignoring, and avoiding our emotions.
Competition and Jealousy
Another way that social media can be problematic is in how much it fosters feelings of competitiveness, jealousy, envy, and insecurity. We feel threatened when someone has more followers or likes than we do. We feel inadequate and inferior to them when they’re more popular than we are. We compare our lows, everything we hide from social media, to the highs they share with the world, forgetting that they experience low points of their own that we may know nothing about. We compare our looks, talents, skills, and accomplishments to other people’s, and we feel down on ourselves when we feel as though we don’t measure up. We often will use our drugs of choice to numb ourselves to these painful feelings of insecurity and self-rejection.
Are you ready to take the first step on your journey to recovery?
Call The Guest House today! 855-823-5463.