The Toxic Swamp of Social Media

What is it about Social Media that seems to bring out the worst in People? Why is it that these apps that were meant to help us connect with each other better can instead cause the sweetest person in the world to mutate in the most vicious beast who will rip your face off if you disagree with them?!!

Well, today we are going to talk about how Social Media could be harming our relationships online and in real life and we’ll give you 3 tips on what you can do to tame the social media monster!

Social media has the ability to bring the very worst out of us. We feel free to type things out online that we would never actually say in person. At least, that’s how it used to be. As we’ve all gotten more accustomed to going out with no filter in our online lives, many of us have now started to find ourselves having are hard time not letting loose on people in real life! One big contributor to this problem is the fact that increased social media can lead us to develop grandiose narcissim.

According to one study, Research shows that higher amounts of social media use predict higher levels of grandiose narcissism. This includes time spent on social media, frequency of posts or tweets, number of friends/followers, and how often participants post pictures of themselves on social media. - (McCain, J. & Campbell, W. (2018). Narcissism and Social Media Use. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 7 (3), 308-327. doi: 10.1037/ppm0000137.)

Grandiose narcissism is characterized by feelings of superiority and entitlement. Social media can fuel those feelings by encouraging users to post frequently even if the content their sharing is of little or no social relevance. The apps also reward frequent posting by boosting posts from more frequent users to the top of their friends newsfeeds. Also, you have the ability to control who can see, who can interact and who you will continue to allow to engage with your posts. This means when anyone disagrees with what you say, you can block them, effectively muting their opinions and allowing yourself to live operate online inside an echo chamber with only people who agree with you. These systems work in your mind over time to develop a more narcissistic worldview.

So, how can we avoid letting social media turn us into a mr. Hyde to the people around us? Our first tip is to MONITOR the time you spend on social media. You can’t regulate what you don’t measure. Moderation is an important discipline in many areas of life, but the first step is to recognize where you may be going overboard.

Tip number two is to pay attention to what you are doing while you’re on social media. If your intention was to connect with friends in the first place but now you find yourself being sucked into the blackhole of clickbait articles, one-sided rhetoric and the non-stop stream of sludge from a hundred different influencers that you're following, it may be a good time to recalibrate your feed. It may not be a bad idea to unfollow a good number of channels or pages that you recognize are reinforcing unhealthy mentalities or promoting a fictional and unattainable lifestyle. Instead, use your time online to keep in touch with people you actually know and care about and follow pages that genuinely add value to your life.

Finally, for some of us, it may be a good time to take a break from social media for a little while. Maybe you could even make it a regular thing and build it into your schedule; No social media after 8pm or stay offline every sunday. Take time to rebuild your real world connections and learn to engage with people with respect in real life and online, even when you disagree. Take the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of why you think what you think OR you might even recognize that you weren’t as right as you assumed and you could learn something from the people around you.