Picture this. You unlock your phone and decide to scroll through your Instagram feed with your morning coffee. The first thing you see is the latest post from your favourite Instagram model, a perfect selfie that reminds you how un-skinny and un-pretty you look sat with your hair unbrushed in the pyjamas you may or may not have been wearing for two days straight.
"How does she always look so put together?" You ask yourself as you kick last nights empty pizza box under the bed and look for the perfect filter and force a smile for your story.
Been there? Me too.
FAKE IT UNTIL YOU MAKE IT.
In 2017, a survey of 1500 young people named Instagram as the worst social media platform for mental health.
The #StatusOfMind survey, published by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society for Public Health, suggested that Instagram, a photo-based platform "sets unrealistic expectations and creates feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem in users", with one respondant stating: “Instagram easily makes girls and women feel as if their bodies aren’t good enough as people add filters and edit their pictures in order for them to look ‘perfect’," according to Time.I'm not ashamed to say I've done it myself. With an array of Instagram filters at my disposal that made my life look just a little more vibrant than it really was, it was hard to resist. Apps like facetune made it easy to fix all my insecurities with the swipe of a finger; make my lips bigger, reduce the size of my forehead, smooth out the rather large spot that decided to set up camp on my chin that morning.
I realised that not only was I falling into the trap of "compare and dispair", but I was contributing to it. To anyone viewing my Instagram feed, my life was a never ending stream of productive work days at my local coffee shop and smiling selfies. My followers didn't see the two hundred sad selfie outtakes in my camera roll, or the days where I couldn't even look at the blinking cursor screaming at me on another empty Word document without wanting to cry.
SO WHY DID I DELETE IT?
Social media has been described as being "more addictive than alcohol and cigarettes," and I was certainly addicted. I was dependent on the validation my "perfect" online persona attracted from my friends and family. I was at the mercy of my own FOMO.[1] I was becoming compliant to the strict beauty standards I hated so much; uploading edited pictures was my submission to the voice in the back of my head telling me I wasn't good enough, and the only person holding it against me was myself.
Instagram creates a vicious cycle that will never end unless you intervene and stop letting doctored images of "perfect" people living "perfect" lives dictate your own self worth. Deleting the app made me confront myself for who I am. I no longer had the escape of a rose tinted camera lens to hide from my own insecurities. I realised how much I measured my success and personal growth against others on the internet.
WHAT I LEARNED.
Nobody is perfect, and the sooner you realise it, the happier you will be in your own skin. Everyone uses social media to portray the best version of themselves, and there is nothing wrong with that.
But next time you scroll through your feed, remind yourself that behind each and every account is a human being. They have days where they sleep in, break their diets, forget to brush their teeth or cry when everything seems to go wrong, even if their "Stories" tell a different story.
INSTAGRAM REHAB.
I implore you to break the addiction. Delete the app for a week and stop whenever you find yourself about to take a picture that makes your bad day look like the best of your life, or edit another selfie.
Maybe then you will start living life for you, instead of for your followers.
Footnotes:
[1] FOMO -- Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a social anxiety stemmed from the belief that others might be having fun while the person experiencing the anxiety is not present. According to Wikipedia.