In September 2018, actress and singer Selena Gomez announced to her then 143 million Instagram followers: “Taking a social media break. Again. As much as I am grateful for the voice that social media gives each of us, I am equally grateful to be able to step back and live my life present to the moment I have been given. Negative comments can hurt anybody’s feelings.” Gomez had undergone a kidney transplant in 2017, notes the National Kidney Foundation. Then, in October 2018, she was hospitalized after an emotional breakdown, possibly related to complications from the transplant. Gomez has since returned to the platform (and others), but has said she keeps more distance from her devices now. “I just really like to separate myself from my phone, and I find that I only want to use my phone when I need it, like making a phone call because I miss a friend or my sister,” she told Bustle in an interview last month. “I think that is a healthy thing for me. I know it’s hard for a lot of people to do, but luckily it’s worked out for me, and I am glad. [Otherwise] it stresses me out,” she said. Model, actress, and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen left Twitter in March 2021, writing, “This no longer serves me as positively as it serves me negatively, and I think that’s the right time to call something,” according to an article published January 5, 2022, on Hollywood.com. Teigen returned to social media after just a few weeks, but explained her hiatus in April. telling USA Today: “It’s hard to exist as a woman on the internet. We’re just nitpicked and torn apart and it’s just brutal.” Spider-Man star Tom Holland had been sparsely posting on Instagram earlier this year, and in August posted in a video on the platform: “I have taken a break from social media for my mental health because I find instagram and Twitter to be overstimulating, to be overwhelming. I get caught up and I spiral when I read things about me online.” Kelly Marie Tran, who acted in Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi, told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published in March 2021 that she left Instagram in 2018 to tune out some of the public commentary. “It was basically me being like, ‘Oh, this isn’t good for my mental health. I’m obviously going to leave this,’” she reportedly said. “All of these people telling me what to say and what to do and how to feel. And I realized, I didn’t know how I felt anymore, she said in the interview. “Any time that happens, I have to close up shop and go away for a while and really interact in the real world.” “We don’t have nearly the enthusiasm and the optimism about social media that we had only [a few] years ago. This is a new thing,” says Elias Aboujaoude, MD, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University in California and author of the book, Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the e-Personality.
What Are the Negative Effects of Social Media?
Sometimes social media can bring out parts of our personalities that aren’t necessarily positive, says Dr. Aboujaoude. “Traits such as narcissism and aggression can come out on online platforms,” he says. “The person often eventually recognizes that this is not a version of themselves that they are proud of or that they want to nurture or present to the world.” There’s been a gradual awakening that many parts of social media aren’t good for us, says Aboujaoude. Many people are realizing, “This presentation of myself to the world as this disinhibited person is not healthy for me as an individual,” he says. And as celebrities have noted, social media can be a harsh place. According to Pew Research surveys of 743 teens and 1,058 parents published September 27, 2018, 59 percent of U.S. teens have been harassed or bullied online. Name-calling and rumor-spreading were the most common forms of harassment reported. Although research to date has yielded mixed results, there are certainly studies that suggest that social media use is significantly associated with depression among young adults, including one study published April 2016 in Depression and Anxiety that looked at a large, nationally representative group of young adults. Other data suggests that the more platforms you use, the greater your odds of having increased levels of both depression and anxiety. The authors suggest it may be worthwhile for clinicians to counsel their patients about how many platforms they use.
What Does It Mean to Be a Friend?
In the case of Gomez and the others, why would they disconnect from their supporters in a time of difficulty? Isn’t that counter to how we usually think of friends and followers? That answer depends on how you define “friend,” says Aboujaoude. “I treat a lot of people with social anxiety disorder. It’s not unusual for me to have a patient who suffers from severe social phobia and feels very isolated in his or her life but somehow happens to have 500 friends on Facebook,” he says. “We’re reaching the point where we’re reassessing whether an online friend is a friend in the true sense of the word.” “On the surface, ‘friends,’ ‘connecting,’ and ‘sharing’ are all very positive terms,” says Aboujaoude. Because of the way social media was packaged and sold to us, we were made to feel as though we would be somehow missing out or were being unkind if we didn’t partake in it, he says. Now we’re recognizing that isn’t necessarily the case.
The Upside of Unplugging From Social Media
Research published April 2021 in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health reveals that average recreational screen time increased by three hours a week during the pandemic — thanks in part to greater social media engagement. While social media may have offered some connection and entertainment during COVID-19 isolation, there are perks to disconnecting. Stepping away from social media can help you be more present and focused in your life, says Aboujaoude. “If you can get control over your social media use and decrease the distractions, it allows you to be more present in the moment,” he says. Another advantage of reducing your online presence is regaining the ability to reconnect with our true self, he says. “So much of what we do online is performative; we’re putting out a persona and allowing certain personality traits to surface even though they don’t really resemble us,” says Aboujaoude. Eventually we might not recognize the person we want to be, similar to the experience Tran said she had. “Stepping away from social media can give us a chance to connect to the person that we really are,” he says.
Social Media Can Be a Source for Connecting, Too
Each individual needs to assess how social media impacts their life, according to Aboujaoude. “I think you have to look at the consequences for each person,” he says. If the person can honestly assess their experience with social media and decides it is adding value to their lives and not interfering with their personal relationships or their professional or academic life, then who’s to say it’s bad, he asks. Studies also find, for example, that for people with certain mental illnesses using social media can help with sharing their personal experiences, seeking information about health and treatment options, and giving and receiving support from others facing similar challenges. And research indeed suggests that it’s not just how much you use social media, but also for what purpose you use it and the emotions its use leads to that ultimately affect whether it has positive or negative effects on your health. “On the other hand, if you feel you’ve lost control over your social media life and that this persona has taken over, or you’re being less attentive to real-life relationships, or your productivity at work or school is suffering, then this is when you might want to consider changing your habits,” Aboujaoude says.
Leaving — and Coming Back to an Online Presence
Does anything really change for people who delete or deactivate accounts, only to come back again? Won’t they fall back into the same patterns eventually? It is possible to return in a more intentional way, according to Aboujaoude. It’s also possible to do a digital detox without pulling the plug full stop. Sometimes people unplug completely, only to realize how challenging it is in today’s world to not have any online presence. Those people often decide to come back, he says, but when they do so, it’s often in a much more studied and measured way. “They felt more in control and felt better about it compared with when they were totally immersed in that world,” he says. With additional reporting by Lauren Bedosky.
