According to the World Health Organization (WHO), nearly one in 20 people will succumb to social media depression at one time or another in their lives. If you think about it, this is an astoundingly high figure. There are plenty of things to be depressed about these days, but social media seems like it shouldn’t be one of them.
This social media depression might be the result of feeling socially isolated, or it might be the result of somehow feeling that everyone else in life is having a good time and you are not. So how do you know if you are at risk of social media depression?
Social media depression is more widespread than you might think
The short answer is that there is no particular personality type that is at most risk of social media depression. That might sound counter-intuitive, but it’s the result of a new medical study by a group of University of Arkansas researchers. They looked at a relatively large sample of 978 people, all in the 18-to-30 age cohort, to determine which personality types and which personality traits might be a warning signal of depression ahead.
All these researchers could conclusively find was that social media depression was directly correlated with high social media usage, regardless of personality type. In other words, it doesn’t matter if you’re an introvert or an extrovert – if you use Facebook and Instagram for endless hours each day and night, you are increasing your risk of becoming depressed. Indeed, that very thought is depressing.
How to prevent depression
According to the researchers, the only solution to prevent depression is to decrease your social media usage. And one way to do that is by outwitting all the various tips and tricks that social media platforms use to keep you staring at the screen. For example, if you’re on YouTube, you’re probably aware of the auto-play feature. This is guaranteed to keep you watching even more videos. Or, you might realize that some social media platforms love to give you “alerts” that increase your Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) in subtle ways. For example, all of a sudden, you might get an alert on your phone that your best friend just posted a photo to Instagram. What are you supposed to do? Just ignore it? No, of course not, you need to spend some time on Instagram!
So, if you are really looking to reduce your chances of social media depression, you need to either set hard cut-offs for how much screen time you will get each day, or you need to disable all the various default features that are designed to keep you hooked. And the word “hooked” is used for a reason: the researchers found that the type of depression that you get from social media usage is analogous to the type of depression encountered by users of addictive substances.
A new type of social media challenge?
If you think about it, the perfect way to prevent social media depression might be an entirely new type of viral social media challenge. You need to challenge yourself and others to use less social media. Some phones and laptops now alert you to how much screen time you are getting per week. So challenge yourself to use less screen time than you did the previous week. It’s not just good for you mentally, it might just open up a whole new set of opportunities and perspectives that you simply weren’t getting with your head down, scrolling endlessly on the screen, at all hours of the day and night.
