Supporting Our Valued Adolescents: A place to learn, share your strength, be positive, and grow.
Most people think of self-care as an ongoing process of maintaining one’s living space, hygiene, and ensuring that basic needs are being met. It’s not always easy or fun, but it’s an essential component to being well. While these activities can seem easy to manage for most, for those dealing with mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, or other conditions, these tasks require a greater deal of time and effort and may not be as often maintained.
Trauma is debilitating. It can make you feel hopeless, alone, and at the very least, it hurts. Everyone has different sources for their trauma (and all of them painful in their own way), and everyone has their own ways of talking, or choosing not to, talk about their trauma.
Chances are, you’ve probably been guilty of caring about how well your posts are doing if you’re on social media. There’s just something so satisfying about seeing the number of views, likes, and comments build up, especially in the first few minutes of a post going live.
The short answer? There are a lot of ways that using technology and specifically social media affects your brain. After all, the brain is always working and responding to everything, with social media being no exception.
The variety of social media platforms, the kind of content they show, and who uses them allows people to wear different “masks” depending on what site or app they go on. Facebook has become more family-dominated, so many teenagers feel like they need to filter themselves so their parents, grandparents, and other extended family don’t see everything. Meanwhile, teens may use Instagram to present a seemingly perfect and aesthetic lifestyle to their peers (finstas, on the other hand, make teens feel like they can show their “true selves”).
When people talk about social media and its effect on people, it’s almost always negative. Many have mentioned and researched about the effect of social media on mental health: feeling unproductive, worrying about what we said or did online, and experiencing FOMO are just a few of the things that affect us from using social media.
Technology has helped make the world feel more connected, making resources, stories, and information much more accessible. This impact is significant for those who are physically isolated and may feel like they’re in the middle of nowhere. In the past, news and entertainment was extremely limited to things such as televisions, magazines and newspapers, and going out to explore was difficult because there were very few things close by.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by social media. With all the different kinds of accounts we can have, the way we can rely on the number of likes and comments we get, and the tendency we have to compare ourselves to others about what we post, social media can heighten feelings of anxiety and/or depression. It doesn’t help that people sometimes endlessly scroll through their social media during depressive episodes or times of increased anxiety, because that’s really all their brains have the energy to do.
While the lasting power of things on the Internet is permanent, the significance and popularity of some things are fickle. Even if Facebook is still up and running, notes and middle school photos buried somewhere deep down your feed, you probably don’t use it anymore – what was once one of the most popular website for teens is now only used by 51% of them, with only 10% saying they use it the most often.
The Internet is both a blessing and a curse. It gives us access to any information from any part of the world, allows us to talk and develop relationships with people we may have otherwise never encountered offline, and is always, always available.
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