How Social Media Endangers Mental Health

Smartphones are increasing the anxiety teens are already facing. Limiting screen time, and supervising children's social media can help parents identify when children are dealing with stress and anxiety. (Shutterstock)

Because social media has become so pervasive in our modern era, it’s easy to forget that Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk are still just a few decades old. The effects of too much time on these sites are still coming into focus, based on more and more scientific study.

Still, ample research has emerged in recent years to demonstrate that social media can contribute significantly to depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues. As a report by Medical News Today states, “National surveys and population-based studies show that the world of social media can have devastating effects on users’ mental health.”

Numerous studies point to adverse mental health effects in young people who spend prolonged time engaged in online activity. A University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine study concluded that “exposure to highly idealized representations of peers on social media elicits feelings of envy and the distorted belief that others lead happier and/or more successful lives.”

I can confirm from firsthand experience—after working with hundreds of clients over several decades—that the misuse of technology has a direct impact on the severity of mental health difficulties. Two principles are important to understand:

Social media is a neutral commodity. Technology itself is neither inherently harmful nor beneficial. Misuse is what causes problems. Social media is like a chainsaw—used properly, it is a helpful, productive tool; used improperly, it is a disaster waiting to happen. It’s our own choices about how we use social media that will determine personal repercussions, for better or worse.

Understanding the dangers of social media helps us avoid trouble. It’s clear that social media is not going away and will likely continue to grow in scope and influence. So we would do well to recognize the pitfalls in order to safeguard our wellbeing.

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Here are some factors that make social media a potential danger to your mental health:

Isolation

A common feature of practically every internet activity is that it’s solitary. Even though you may be messaging, chatting, or gaming with others online, most often you are physically alone.

Interacting with others only through electronic media filters our communication and strips away a huge range of important nonverbal signals. Researchers estimate that 65 to 85 percent of all communication takes place through nonverbal cues, such as eye contact, facial expression, and hand gestures. If you want to know what a person really thinks and who they really are, you have to be in personal contact with them. Real connection by electronic means is impossible. Essentially, online relationships skip normal development and often create a sense of “instant intimacy,” which is not true emotional closeness.

Also, isolation enables us to create “false personas”—virtual identities we present in cyberspace that bear little resemblance to who we actually are. These alter egos allow us to adopt traits we ordinarily shun in face-to-face relationships. Or they enable us to hide away all evidence of distress and dysfunction in our real lives.

False Intimacy with So Many ‘Friends’

In real life, what matters most is the quality of relationships, not the quantity of friends or followers. Social media creates the dichotomy of having dozens or hundreds of online friends but not feeling particularly close to many (or any) of them.

It might be that social media allows you to stay connected and up to date with real-life friends, especially those who live far away. But the problem arises when your so-called connections to online friends leave you feeling disconnected to living, breathing people.

Before the rise of online technology, frequent social contact made it harder to hide from each other. Now, though, it’s possible to have virtual communities where you never actually see or hear another person. With relationships occurring only through screens, if happening at all, interactions are cursory and often superficial.

Cyberbullying and Virtual Conflict

Although bullying has occurred for eons at playgrounds, street corners, and workplaces, digital technology has increased and expanded the ways harassment can be meted out.

Cyberbullying is different from traditional bullying because people can hide behind the guise of “anonymity” to electronically abuse their victims. Screens provide a smokescreen from identification and responsibility. A person needs only a valid email address to create or participate in groups, making it easy to set up fake accounts and bully anonymously. This practice has become alarmingly widespread, according to statistics from the i-Safe foundation:

• Over half of adolescents and teens have been bullied online, and about the same number have engaged in cyberbullying.
• More than 1 in 3 young people have experienced cyberthreats online.
• Well over half of young people do not tell their parents when cyberbullying occurs.

While normally thought of as a problem only among teens, cyberbullying can happen to anyone. According to the Pew Research Center, 41 percent of U.S. adults report they’ve been the target of online harassment—including 18 percent who say the incidents were “severe,” such as sustained stalking and threats of violence.

A Crisis of Comparison

Before the internet, those we compared ourselves to were mostly flesh-and-blood people. They lived down the street or worked down the hall. It was at least possible to see them at their worst as well as their best. And they numbered in the dozens at most.

Now, we compare ourselves to thousands of virtual “neighbors.” And we see only what they allow us to see—happy dinners with friends, exotic excursions, kids receiving awards, crossing the finish line at the Boston Marathon.

With social media, people are able to focus on key aspects of their lives, highlighting the positive and omitting anything they want to hide. While we are intimately aware of the daily trials and struggles of our own lives, our friends’ lives appear to be a string of successes punctuated infrequently by minor setbacks that are handled with grace and poise.

A person at risk for mental health problems is already poised to believe that his or her life doesn’t measure up to the lives of others. The internet provides persuasive evidence that they’re right about that.

Toxic Content

While much of what you see on the internet presents an overly rosy view of reality, other sites peddle the opposite extreme: nonstop doom and gloom. We witness an alarming parade of war, famine, political strife, social injustice, and environmental catastrophe.

It’s as if news organizations, bloggers, chat group members, and millions of commenters have conspired to turn whole regions of cyberspace into a dystopian movie, where everything is ravaged and smoldering. Spend much time there, and you’ll be convinced the world teeters on the edge of calamity and collapse every second of every day.

A Sense of Squandering Time

When our time on social media goes unchecked, we can spend hours of our day and have nothing to show for it. And when we lose hours to random browsing and surfing, feeling unfulfilled is just the beginning.

We can also begin to feel overwhelmed because our lack of productivity is catching up to us and creating stress from life and work tasks that are going undone. The fallout from slipping into the black hole of wasted hours online can wreak havoc with our lives and our emotions.

The internet presents an infinite warehouse full of options. One click leads to a hundred more possibilities. Social media is a bottomless pit of posts, likes, follows, and comments—and before you know it, whole evenings or whole days have disappeared.

Emotional Contagion

This is the phenomenon where the emotions of one person in a group—a family, a work staff, even a collection of friends showing up on a social media feed—can spread to others in the same group. In essence, people involuntarily absorb and adopt emotions transmitted through online communication.

Emotional contagion has both downsides and upsides. For example, positive expressions of emotion—smiles, joy, optimism—are catchy. In fact, researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler have concluded that for every happy friend you have, you increase your own probability of being happy by almost 10 percent.

Likewise, negative emotions are transmissible too. Even negative body language—like frowns and crossed arms—can spread like wildfire in a group.

Research has shown that happiness, anger, sadness, and everything in between can be passed on to an individual through social media. One study examined 3,800 randomly selected social media users, testing the contagiousness of the emotional tones of the content they viewed online. The study found that emotional states are easily manipulated through social media, and simply reading emotionally charged posts can transfer emotional states to the reader.

Your exposure to negative rants, tragic news, drama, and conflict in your virtual friend circles are not without impact. And yet—because emotional contagion typically works on a subconscious level—you can find yourself mirroring the negativity to which you are exposed on social media.