How social media is getting you down

Cherry is a 28-year-old single mother of a perfect little 18-month-old boy. She is a successful marketer heading a top marketing team in a big company where she works. She is going places. Her team has been christened ‘The dream team’. She seems to have struck the elusive work-life balance.

She is home at 5pm every day to ride the bike with her little munchkin and there are photos all over Facebook to illustrate her wonderful life.

In another part of the city, Awuor, a stunning 30-year-old, whose make-up is always perfectly done and hair always in place, is busy posting pictures and snippets of her upcoming lavish wedding on Facebook.

Her Facebook friends were there (virtually), when her long-term boyfriend Steve flew her to Dubai last Valentine’s Day and proposed to her with a huge diamond in an underwater restaurant. From the pictorial evidence on Awuor’s Facebook and Instagram walls, she and Steve seem like the perfect definition of love.

Welcome to social media where everybody seems brighter, happier, more attractive and more successful than you! And this is exactly how Linnet Kendi, a 29-year-old Nairobi businesswoman felt when she joined Facebook for the first time, five years ago. Linnet’s life took a different direction, from what she had envisioned, when she fell pregnant during her second year of university. She left college to attend to her baby and was stuck at her parent’s home in Thika.

Meanwhile, her friends went on with their lives and seemingly exceeded hers as she found out when she joined Facebook and reconnected with them three years after she left college. “I was doing odd jobs around Thika town and having been one of the popular girls at university, I felt ashamed, frustrated and even angry because all my peers seemed to be doing exceptionally well, and obviously better than me.

Fabulous lives

My friends had all graduated, got their first jobs and all I could see were pictures of their fabulous lives as they dined in fancy restaurants,” she recalls.

For months, Linnet watched her peers’ ‘perfect’ lives play out. Some were buying cars, others were getting married and yet she remained stuck. Her self-esteem was so eroded that every time she came to Nairobi, she found herself keeping to the busier streets downtown to avoid bumping into one of these successful ladies. Eventually out of frustration, she quit Facebook. She only reactivated her account mid-last year when her clothes import business became stable. “Now I have things to show and tell,” she says.

Linnet’s feelings of depression evoked by comparing her life with the lives of her friends through social media have been well captured by numerous past studies which sought to establish the link between the use of social media and mental well-being. Most of these studies involved Facebook, one of the world’s biggest social networking sites.

One 2012 study published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behaviour and Social Networking linked Facebook use to feelings of depression, anxiety and envy. This study found that the more time people spent on Facebook, and the more ‘friends’ they had on Facebook, the worse they felt about their lives. A recent study by the University of Missouri in the US, published by the university’s news bureau, found that while people who use Facebook to stay connected with others do not suffer negative effects, those like Linnet, who engage in what the researchers call “surveillance use” experience symptoms of depression.

Surveillance use means browsing the social networking site to compare how you are doing compared to your peers. The study found that posts about expensive vacations, new cars or happy relationships can evoke feelings of envy among Facebook users who compare themselves against these standards.

This is a seemingly harmless silent social media stalking what leads to comparisons and envy, and envy in turn leads to symptoms of depression or dissatisfaction like in Linnet’s case. Ida Too, a Nairobi-based psychologist, believes the situation is exacerbated when users spend too much time on social networking sites.

Pictures out of context

“When you are busy making virtual connections, it is easy to become a victim of your own thoughts. Moreover, it makes you more socially withdrawn. The more time you spend there, the less you physically bond with actual people. In isolation, and with all these happy successful people to compare yourself with, it becomes easy to focus all your energy on the things that aren’t right in your job, your relationship or your life in general,” she explains.

What we forget is that people don’t share the bad stuff; that whatever you see or read doesn’t show the complete picture. Whenever you are using social media try to keep perspective,” Ms Too cautions.

“Do not believe even the pictures. They are easily taken out of context. If you see a photo of your friends’ smiling faces in what looks like a restaurant, your first instinct will be to conclude that you were not invited to the girls’ lunch and this may erode your relationship with those friends,” she adds.

Wangechi, a 27-year-old assistant marketing manager at a regional firm, whose social media posts make her seem like she has her act together and all figured out, concurs that things may not always be in real life as they seem on social media.

She says that people may put up a happy front that is far from the reality of their lives, and warns that this happy front could work against the user by causing the ‘happy’ user feelings of distress.

“There is a lot of pressure. “On social media, I am that straight-shooting successful marketer who doesn’t leave the house without wearing make-up and a smile. I have an amazing job and get to holiday outside the country every few months.”

This is a contrast from the woman she says she actually is. For starters she is an introvert whose idea of fun is a Saturday curled up on a couch reading a book. She doesn’t like make-up that much and she admits that she isn’t sure of the direction she wants her career to take. All the times she has stepped outside the country were when she was working.

“Everybody seems to have this social media persona,” she explains the reasons she feels pressure to put up a front; a front which can make people who compare their ‘dull’ lives with hers dissatisfied.

On the flip side, Wangechi shares that once a social media user creates this picture perfect image of herself, it becomes hard to break away from the hype to share about the struggles she is going through.

“Your friends (virtual connections) already have this ideal image of you, how do you then turn around and poke holes in it? You end up facing the rough patches all by yourself and this I guess might also contribute to a depression that comes from social media use,” she says. So with all these mental health traps, is the solution to quit social media to avoid being depressed?

According to Ms Too, a psychologist, quitting social media like Linnet did is not the guard against feelings of depression and dissatisfaction elicited by social networking sites.

Instead, she says that it starts with understanding your reason for using a particular site.

On the same note, Margaret Duffy, one of the professors who conducted the recent study that linked some forms of Facebook use to depression, advises that awareness of the risk of getting depressed from browsing through the social media lives of their friends, is what will keep Facebook users from feeling awful based on social comparisons.

“Facebook can be a very positive resource for many people, but if it is used as a way to size up one’s own accomplishments against others, it can have a negative effect. It is important for Facebook users to be aware of these risks so they can avoid this kind of behaviour when using Facebook,” said Professor Duffy in a report on the University of Missouri News Bureau website.

Stalking?

The consensus is that social media by itself doesn’t seem to pose any risks to our mental or emotional health. How you use the sites is what determines how they affect you. If used correctly, it can in fact be a healthy addition to our lives.

Genuinely examine your use of these sites to determine whether they are hurting or helping you. If you find out that your social media use is doing the former, think of ways of using it more productively.

The 2012 study which linked Facebook use to depression also found that the larger, your network, the more friends you have, the more social anxiety you are likely to have, so you can start by cutting down your list of virtual friends to only those people you know and want to keep in touch with.

It is also apparent that silent social media stalking is likely to lead to comparison and negative feelings, so try more direct methods of contact on social media like sending private messages.

This way, you can really connect with friends, without being put in a position to compare your life to theirs. Also, on a private platform, a friend is more likely to open up on the downs in their lives and you will get to see the complete picture. While at it, remember that just like you, everyone else is putting on a mask.

Lastly, limit the time you spend on social media.

“If you spend all your free time on Facebook and Instagram, it takes away time that you would have spent doing other things like exercising, yoga or other positive physical interactions that are good for your mental health,” Ms Too warns.