Today evening, I ended up watching a TEDx video by Bailey Parnell. Then, I actually realized how social media is hurting our mental health, and many times we don’t even notice it.

If you know according to research, we see many people have been diagnosed with major mental health issues. The three main health issues are: Anxiety, depression and stress. Specially, today’s youth have been facing this high level mental health issues.

If you observe people around you, you may notice people spend more than 2 hours a day in social media. We don’t even spend 2 hours a day for our meals, which is a basic need of human being.

The main problem is that, we don’t even recognize that “social media” is harming us. Even in a small way, as these small issues can turn up to be big one someday. So, we need to check on how social media is harming us.

Stressors on Social Media:

First and foremost is “Highlight Reel”, it means where people post and share there happiest and good moments or pictures. Basically, everyone using social media is suffering from this as we compare our behind-the-scene with everyone else’s highlight reel.

For example: Looking at your friend’s post, many times we say things like wow, what a beautiful photo, he or she is blessed with beauty and great life. Here, we compare their highlight reel with our real life. Here goes a great line, “The grass is always greener on Social Media”.

Second is Social Currency, just like the real currency, there is a social currency. We start giving value to the post with likes, comments, shares or number of views, etc. Here, we are losing our self identity as we depend upon other person’s attention. In today’s youth number of likes, comments and followers decide how great you are doing in life, people compare their likes from other person’s post and give value accordingly to themself.

Then comes the third one that is Fear of missing out, it is a fear of missing some opportunity or connection with others. Many times we think of deleting social media like insta account and fb account, but then we start thinking that we may lose opportunity or miss out some news or being left out.

Last but not the least, online harassment. Specially many girls can relate to this one. I guess more than 30-40% of the population in social media have experienced online harassment. If we look online many peoples post are being viral nowadays, like you do a silly activity and someone posted it on social media and now it goes viral even that is an online harassment. Many people around the globe have committed suicide due to online harassment.

So, we all need to take care of ourself and dear ones from being hurt by social media.