Meme Girls

I keep reading about how detrimental social media usage is, with people avoiding face-to-face interaction and feeling inferior when they see everyone else looking gorgeous and having fabulous lives. Would you recommend taking regular breaks from social media?

--Instagrammer Girl

Put on 10 pounds recently? No problem! There's surely an app that'll stick your head on the bod of some 22-year-old actress who works out 13 hours a day and subsists on Nicorette gum and bottles of air blessed by monks. Social media is often seen as Satan with cat memes. It gets blamed for everything from eating disorders to the decline in the bee population. But consider that how a person uses social media can shape how it affects them. Psychologist Sarah M. Hanley and her colleagues note that there are two different kinds of social media users: active and passive. Active social media users create content and communicate with others. Passive users browse newsfeeds and posts without commenting. They're basically read-only info consumers. For both active and passive users, taking a vacation from social networking sites like Facebook and Instagram is a thing lately -- the digital version of cutting out sugar (at least temporarily). But is it actually a good thing? Hanley and her colleagues blocked research participants' access to social media sites for a week. They figured this would benefit passive users -- the silent observers -- giving them a break from the noxious barrage of how rich, beautiful, and successful everyone else seems to be. In fact, passive users' well-being wasn't really affected positively or negatively during their social media exile. However, active users ended up being kind of bummed (or, in researcher terms, they had diminished "positive affect" -- a decrease in positive, pleasant moods, and feelings). This makes sense, because using these sites in an engaged way -- when, say, a mob isn't coming after you because you like your coffee "wrong" -- can be a positive thing, increasing social connection. So when active users pull the plug on their social media, they separate themselves not only from the negatives but also from the social and emotional benefits of engaging with others. In short, social media is a tool -- same as an ax, which you can use to cut wood for a lovely campfire or to chase terrified teenagers through the forest. You can choose to take an emotionally healthy approach to social media: be an active participant instead of a passive one by posting stuff or at least participating in conversations, even in small ways. If somebody's barrage of fabulosity gets you down, you might remind yourself of all the reality that gets cropped out -- a la, "Here's a pic of my boyfriend and me in Cabo for two weeks...during the 1 minute and 37.6 seconds we weren't fighting. #Cabocouples #grateful #livingmybestlife" ... For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.