Social Media And Mental Health

Social media is a blessing and a curse. Some people thrive with social media and create amazing opportunities for themselves, while other people use it to bring other people down. Social media can be good to help promote small businesses, but sometimes, it can get out of hand because one person can say something negative about their experience and it can make or break that business. 

People become obsessed with trying to get the most likes and views or hoping to become viral so they can become the next big thing, but at the end of the day, those numbers mean nothing. As time goes on, social media will become an addiction to the point where people rely on getting people’s opinions and advice on everything. They can’t go a minute without checking out the numbers and interacting with people who comment and not every comment is going to be a good one. 

Whenever someone leaves a negative comment, everyone’s first thought is to react and respond to that comment, but it only adds fuel to the fire. The more you engage with that person, the more negative they’re going to get. They want to get a rise out of you. They want to find a reason to keep commenting. The only thing you can do is leave the comment alone, by deleting and blocking. The more attention you bring to it, the more other people are going to keep being negative. 

It's hard to step away from social media. It's a way to stay connected, but not being able to stay in touch online is hard for some people especially if you make a living by being online. Every video someone uploads, every blog post someone writes, brings in an income for someone and not being able to do that can be difficult and challenging. They’re scared to lose that piece of them because they think it's not going to be anything else. They rely on people they don’t know to help them pay bills. 

Trying to keep up appearances online and in real life can affect your mental health. You can become two different people. The person you are online and the person you are in your daily life, the side that your followers don’t see and sometimes it's not a good thing. You keep up with your online persona so much that your true personality stops being who you are and it starts to make the people you know offline not want to be around you. People get consumed with everything online that nothing else matters.

Social media can either make you humble or it can be harmful. People get so invested, they can’t tell the difference between the online world and reality. It changes people. Everything we do is online, but some people have the ability to walk away and take a break. 

To keep your mental health safe and intact, we have to know that not everything online is who we are, we can’t let people tell us who we should be and tell us what we should do. The world is a cruel place. We shouldn't allow people we don’t know to dictate our lives.