Nowadays, social media has become integral part of our daily life, especially among young people and teenagers. It provides many advantages such as connectivity with world to access information quickly on time but it also gives bad impact for mental health. I strongly believe that social media can give many negative impacts for our mental health especially it can affect our self-esteem, increase anxiety levels, creating isolation feeling and cyberbullying.
One of the main issues with social media is that it promotes many unrealistic standards which are difficult to be possible in everyone’s life. Instagram and Facebook which are known as social platforms are full with photos and reels which are edited to highlight to show only perfect part. Those seemingly perfect image misrepresents the reality life and making our life easy to compare with them. Most of the people especially for teenagers can experience low self-esteem by wrong comparison. Research have shown that seeing those unrealistic perfect life of other people can make unhappy with their own life and not satisfied with their look that can lead to depression. As an example, most of the young users of social media felt unhappy about their ordinary life after seeing and spending time on these platforms.
There is also another problem which are anxiety and stress caused by using social media. People who focusing on likes and notifications that are given by others can start to feel pressured and fear of missing out with the updated information on social media as it can release dopamine which is similar with other addictive substances. Addictive to social media can lead to become using overtime at those platforms and reduce spent time in the real world. Spending time in the real world is more essential to building strong relationships with our family and reduce stress. Online interaction can make weaken relations among friends or family as they neglect the quality time with them. They can start to feel loneliness because of using much time by scrolling through new feeds of the social media.
The percentage of the teenage girls facing cyberbullying on social media is more than the boys. Since they use social media for many hours to share their daily life and personal experience by using photos and videos it become their vulnerable to get their sensitive information by cybervictimization and attackers. Cyberbullying can increase the risks of suicidal thoughts and depression for people.
In conclusion, even social media has advantages for our development its negative impact on mental health is hard to ignore. As it shows only unrealistic figure which are lower user’s self-esteem and increase anxiety especially for young generation people. Cyberbullying is also the things that we should also consider as it can kill our mind and feel depression. We should have to use social media wisely and mindfully to get advantages by connecting with world without harming mental health. Balancing real-world connections and social life is key to make social media to remains a positive impact in our life.