Before learning about how social media is linked to depression, it is important to first clarify and access the basic human needs. To be a part of a community and to be loved is a basic phychological human need. Typically, these needs are furfilled by friends, family, significant other, etc. Human relationships and love is what makes up self esteem in ourselves. Self esteem is important to huild confidence in ourselves aswell. Lack of self esteem or interaction with ones peers is how despression can be caused. Even tough it seems like social media can fix these problems to a certain extent, you need these real life relationships and experiances.
Social media can cause depression in a number of ways. People tend to lower their self esteem when their depressed, feel hopeless, loose interest in things that used to interest them in the past, constantly sad. All these things can be a factor ofm excessive social media use. Social medias like instagram and Facebook are platforms that share aspects and experiances in eachothers lives. When you abuse social media, you begin to compare your life to the ones you see on these platforms. You see people pop up on your feed that are rich, more popular then you, and seeing this can lower the self esteem of a normal person and make them feel hopeless and sad that their life isnt as impressive as the others they see. Also, people post content on these platforms in hopes to recieve positive feedback from thier peers, and if you arent getting many likes or comments it can make you feel sad aswell. The worst thing about social media that makes it addciting is the feeling of dopamine you get from endlessly scrolling. Dopamine is a natural feeling that is supposed to be derived from sex, food, social interactions, etc. It is unhealthy to be constantly seeking a dopamine rush from social media.
Social Media has the biggest effect on teenagers nowadays, and young generations to come in the future. Teens get easily distracted with social media, staying up past their bedtime scrolling through social media texting, trolling etc. Not only can this effect sleep, also it keeps teens from interacting with their peers in real life. Before social media, kids would meet their friends outside, or hang out at the mall for example. Teens are begining to communicate with eachother online which is takling away from real life experiances that are crucial to have an ideal childhood. I think this will keep getting worse for generations to come, unless we do everything we can to make adolescents minimize their screen time and have a balance between real life communication and online communication.
However, if used properly social media can be used positively for mental health. As long as you can control yourself and have a proper balance between online and real life experiances with your peers, social media can be a good thing. You van use social media to stay connected with things going on around the world, like keeping up with the news in different parts of the world. Also social media can be used to stay in touch with family/friends that live in different parts of the country. Social media can also be used to network with people, to find different job opportunites as well. You can also make an income on social media on TikTok or youtube, by making ingaging content like videos or memes. Social media is also a great tool to voice your opinions on certain subjects, like twitter for instance. Social media is a great tool for advertisement if you own a company aswell. Nowadays, almost all big companies use social media to market their products and communicate with their custumers.
To make sure you are not using social media excessively, you must control your habits and moods. Many apps like tiktok and instagram reels can put you into a "dopamine loop" there are a few things you can do to prevent this. One way that users get a dopamine hit is when they get reactions on social media like a retweet, a like or a comment. Usually you get a rush of dopamine once you get a notification on your phone when this happens. One thing you can do is turn off the notifications on your phone. In my experiance, this helped a lot. I would completely forget about my social media engagements for a long period of time, and when im done with everything I had to do I could relax and check my instagram or snapchat. This helps give a balance to social media use and makes sure you arent getting distracted while trying to study, or exercise. Also, monitoring your screen time is very important when trying to control your habits aswell. Gradually cuttting down on your daily screen time every week is a good way to manage social media addiction.