We now spend huge amounts of time consuming and subjecting ourselves to opinions online. From the latest popular album to the next Instagram health trend, we are bombarded with messages everyday, and I don’t think it’s making us happy.

Keeping up with the trends is fun and it’s a great way to gain conversation starters, but it’s not a way to look after your mental health. The constant use of social media in today's society would have you believe it necessary to keep a twitter account or Facebook profile to keep up to date with everything in life. Social media even has us convinced that it’s where our value as people lie. If you make one bad or perhaps under-researched comment, you’re instantly subjected to a spiral of hate and degradation, which, if you’re not comfortable or confident with yourself, can be a major issue.

Finding your voice as an individual is hard enough, finding it in a crowd of people with diverse opinions and horrifically high standards is borderline impossible. During lockdown, I realised this. I was never comfortable with myself for a start, especially as a socially anxious person in general. To me, social media seemed like the best place in the world for several years. I could communicate with people without having to utter a word from my mouth, and they didn’t have to see my face, nor did they have any access to my awkward body language. But a while ago, I decided to take a year-long break from social media – which, undoubtedly, is the best thing I’ve ever done.

I deactivated my account and began to think of what I hoped to achieve by doing so. This is the first step. I wanted to work on my career goals and repertoire of writing and with social media, I wasn’t doing that. The time I could’ve spent improving my skills was spent subjecting myself to false personas of people and becoming increasingly anxious that I didn’t have the right persona to interact with people there – that’s the trick of social media. People easily become who they are not – be it confident, outspoken or seemingly timid and shy. I instantly noticed a stark increase in my work ethic and found hours of time freed. I even had time to go walking for an hour every day!

The second step, once realising what my goals were, was to find a variety of tasks to replace the hours I’d spent there. Having a healthy work balance meant I couldn’t just spend several hours only writing. I quickly found joy in hobbies I had seemingly begun to hate once I’d turned 15. Reading had become something I did to impress my followers on social media: I had to read what I thought would attract them, or unconsciously, I’d pick something that I could post to make my persona increasingly impressive. Now, I read for comfort and joy and don’t consider anyone’s opinion on what I like – simply because I’m not aware of what anyone else’s opinion is. Without social media, I seem to care less what others think because I’m no longer focused on creating an image for myself. I’m focused on creating happiness for myself.

Yet, I don’t simply recommend that one must quit social media to be happy. I have a deep understanding through various conversations with friends that not everyone is willing to. In these cases, I think it’s best to learn how to curate the content you see on your feed and cut down on the number of hours you spend there. Only follow or befriend people you know won’t have a negative impact on your mental health. Others have said to me that places like twitter are the only place they can get unbiased information about worldwide events. I understand this to be true to a certain extent, but I don’t fully believe it. Researching events that genuinely interest you often leads you to a greater extent of written material on that subject than twitter or other websites would have you believe. I think it’s possible to be happy with social media and I think it’s possible to be happy without it. Ultimately, the choice is up to you. 

About the author

Atlanta Doeg is a writer from the United Kingdom with a passion for all art forms - stand-up comedy, music, television, film etc. When she’s not writing about these things, she’s often trying to create her own pieces. Atlanta blogs about books at: @bookishdays on instagram and other things at apprecatingcreators.wordpress.com