Self-care & social media

Thoughts and tips on managing your time spent online

Hello & I hope you’re having a lovely day to anyone reading.

The part social media has increasingly played in establishing human connection has been a dominant theme of social discourse since the genesis of Facebook in 2004. The pandemic is just the latest in a series of social developments which has solidified the seeming inextricability of social media and communicating with the people in your life. What was previously a convenient means of chatting to people you knew became, for many, their sole link to loved ones as we moved into global lockdown, and this remains an ongoing fact of life for many of the most vulnerable people in our society.

In the same sense that people have expressed feeling a form of ‘re-opening anxiety’, the increased pressure to now socialise in-person after months apart complicates one’s need for and use of social media. The perks of working from home mirror those which come from using social media as a tool of interaction. Skyping or texting are free of worries of infection, the state of your appearance and complement the reduced stress and time pressure of a home-centred lifestyle. While the majority of people are likely welcoming the return to normality, social media will undoubtedly remain an important connection to the other people for those who are more anxious about re-connecting with a world they’ve isolated themselves from for the past year.

Adjusting to fluctuating levels of reliance on social media means adopting an approach to online connectivity and social media which focuses on self-care. Self-care looks different for different people’s lifestyles and so the switch to work-at-home, for many, signals a new set of needs and wants. For young people, delineating the needs and the wants of social media is especially difficult after having grown up with a perception of it as an invariable part of the way modern life is lived. Separating what we want and what we need from it is far harder for us than those who experienced childhood, adolescence and early adulthood without the all-seeing eyes of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

I would generally define self-care as the practice of adhering to principles and behaviours in life which prioritise your health and happiness. Social media has established itself as a constant in modern life, meaning it too plays a necessary role in any attempt at self-care. It connects us to other people, is often a source for comedy and creativity, and offers a positive outlet for the majority of young users. The drawbacks are, however, feelings of lack of productivity, the spread of misinformation and a misrepresentation of lifestyle or appearance. Instagram in particular has a well-documented history of enforcing unhealthy and unattainable beauty standards which are especially harmful to more impressionable users.

However, the net positives and negatives of social media are already well understood by people in their early to late twenties, who grew up in the liminal space between social media in its relative infancy and oversaturation of it and its content.

My advice for practicing self-care is determining what positives you personally derive from social media and ensuring your usage is focused on that. Your own relationship to social media is not defined by external opinions; it can be surprisingly easy to intuit what benefits and drawbacks it has on your wellbeing after what is potentially decades of use. For anyone struggling to determine which parts they enjoy and which aspects are draining, I would suggest trying to cut yourself off for a few hours, days, or even a week at a time. During this period, try and sourcing the things you miss most and the things, if any, you are grateful to experience a break from.

I used to have an incredibly outward-facing relationship with Instagram in terms of followers and likes. Reducing the importance of this for myself has meant I barely use Instagram at all anymore and I feel like nothing is missing from my life in its absence. I have likewise deleted the Facebook and Twitter apps from my phone and, even as a temporary measure, I have noticed a significant difference in the way I spend my time, which makes me feel good. It permits me to focus more on the forms of social media which I find informative or entertaining (namely YouTube) and I suggest this filtration of the content you absorb for anyone struggling to fit social media into their self-care routine.

Self-care is not defined, as a lot of older people might say, by the absence of social media. For people who have grown up with it as a prerequisite of interacting with other people, self-care and social media simply require balance which adjusts to your age and life experience. It is so important to allow yourself to freely enjoy whatever you like, if it makes you feel happy and healthy.

Thanks so much to anyone who took the time to read this. Love to you all.

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“I’d been pondering this, and concluded that there must be some people for whom difficult behaviour wasn’t a reason to end their relationship with you. If they liked you…then, it seemed, they were prepared to maintain contact, even if you were sad, or upset, or behaving in very challenging ways. This was something of a revelation.” - Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine