April 7, 2023
Cindy Lopez:
A Pew research center study in 2022 revealed that nearly 80% of 13 through 17 year olds check at least one social media feed hourly. And over a third said they did so almost constantly. How can we develop healthy social media practices that support not hinder our mental health? Today’s episode is hosted again by my colleague, Natalie Tamburello, and she’s in conversation with CHC’s experts, Dr. Tracy Cavaligos, Licensed Psychologist and Dr. Olivia McDonald, Psychology Post-Doctoral Fellow talking about how to manage social media’s influence and develop skills to check in with and support our kids. Take it away Natalie.
Natalie Tamburello:
Welcome to the Voices of Compassion Podcast. My name is Natalie Tamburello, and I am a member of the Community Connections team here at CHC, and I’m honored to be hosting this episode where we will discuss the impact of social media on mental health. Welcome Olivia and Tracy.
Tracy Cavaligos:
Thank you so much for having us. We both specialize in working with adolescents and we’re happy to be here to talk a little bit about social media and mental health today.
Olivia McDonald:
Yeah, I’m so excited to be here. I’ve really been looking forward to discussing this topic. I actually did my dissertation on social media and mental health, so this is something I’m really passionate about.
Natalie Tamburello:
So let’s just start off with how social media can actually impact your mental health, and I think a lot of people assume that it just affects you negatively, but I wanna also talk about the positive ways that it can impact or maybe improve your mental health.
Tracy Cavaligos:
Yeah, like you said, social media isn’t entirely good or bad. As with most things in our life, there’s gonna be pros and cons that we wanna be aware of. Let’s start with some of the wonderful things about social media. It can increase our connection with others. We can build a community, we can stay close with friends and family who are far away. So that distance isn’t gonna limit our friendships and relationships like it has before in the past. It’s easier now to connect with like-minded people. They can validate our experiences and share our perspectives, and we’re not gonna be as isolated. Also, we’re gonna access different perspectives much more easily. We have access to information like never before. We can learn new skills, answer questions, and get entertainment within seconds. It allows us the space to share, be creative and be heard on a larger platform.
Olivia McDonald:
Yeah, I absolutely agree. There are gonna be tons of positives. On the flip side of the coin, social media might also set us up to see mostly just the good stuff. For some people filtering out the negativity of like let’s say news outlets can be really helpful for their own mental health, but typically when we’re thinking about like snapshots, we’re really only seeing the curated side of like what other people are putting out there. I like to think of it as social media is often a highlight reel of the events and moments that people show their followers that aren’t always giving us a sneak peek into their reality and this puts some people in the position to assume that other people’s lives are gonna be better, happier, more accomplished than our own because of that snapshot kind of effect. On the note of comparison, there’s a huge culture of labeling other people or influencers as like hashtag goals. And even without that there’s an increased risk of struggling with things like low self-esteem, body dysmorphia, or even just kind of like how you view yourself generally as a result of what you’re consuming on social media. Social media can also provide a false sense of connection, particularly if it’s replacing most or all of your in-person connections, and if you’re already struggling with loneliness or feeling left out this can really exacerbate that and unintentionally reinforce that internal narrative that when you see other people together having fun, announcing big events, achieving goals, stuff like that. And then on a similar line of thought compared to like original social media, like when I was growing up, more modern social media has algorithms, and algorithms are gonna filter in and out what they think you wanna see and share content really specific to that. So like similar viewpoints that you have, beliefs that it thinks you have and like while on the one side that’s super handy, it can help you curate your social media consumption to feel more enjoyable in the short term. It’s also setting us up to exist in an echo chamber where we’re only being shown like one viewpoint and people that we agree with. And unless you’re really intentional, this can set you up to be robbed of like opportunities to be curious, learn new things, other viewpoints, stuff like that. And then finally we get a dopamine release in the pleasure center of our brain. When we pick up our phone or log into social media dopamine is gonna be that feel good chemical in our brain that releases a reward signal when we do something. So using social media apps is essentially priming your brain into giving yourself a reward that feels good every single time you pick up your device.
Natalie Tamburello:
It’s really interesting you’re talking about like back in my day, us millennials who didn’t have ,didn’t have algorithms to rely on. I’ve always thought of social media as a very passive engaging activity, but it’s even more passive now cause we don’t have to search and find what we want or what we’re interested in. It’s just right there for you even more so than before. So this leads into our next question, which is what’s the difference between passive and active social media engagement and how does that impact you differently?
Olivia McDonald:
Yeah. So I actually really love that question that’s something I talk to a lot of the teens I work with about and so the explanation that I like to give is that active is when you’re not only consuming content, but you’re also engaging with other users. So that’s gonna be things like responding to other content or comments, messaging other users or even playing like multiplayer interactive games like World of Warcraft, Roblox, stuff like that. These would all be considered active engagement because you’re fully participating in the platform, you’re engaging in a reciprocal activity similar to how you would in an in-person social interaction where there’s that give and take. Other forms of active engagement could also be things like putting out your own content.
Now passive social media engagement is gonna be a lot like what teenagers today are calling like doom scrolling. So you’re not engaging with other users or you’re barely engaging with other users. You’re not commenting or just generally participating in like the forums. You’re literally just sitting back and like consuming content and of course this isn’t all negative, sometimes that’s what we need to feel recharged, to gain new information or even have like the buildup that you need to build that courage to see if like you’re a good fit for particular group that you’ve joined and then starting to engage more actively from there. So from there there’s also like a bit of an argument that I noticed over whether scrolling with minimal to no engagement can technically be considered active engagement. And I’d say for like the most part, a lot of us swing on the side where I’d say no. However, if you’re in a place where you’re seeking like really specific kinds of content, researching stuff like that, it might swing more towards active in the sense that you’re actively consuming intentional knowledge, maybe not active in the sense that you’re engaging with the online community, but the key here is that intentionality is everything and what’s a positive experience for you.
Tracy Cavaligos:
There’s also a little bit too of like that algorithm we were talking about before of what the algorithm is gonna consider active, like you watching a video or liking or commenting on the algorithm that’s active, but we’re gonna talk about your own role or like the user’s view of what active or passive is and kind of what Olivia’s been saying, it’s never just like a simple good or bad, and there are positive and negatives to like being passive or active in your engagement, and it’s gonna be different for each person. So really the most important aspect is like you’re intentional with how you’re using your social media, even if it’s active or if it’s passive, really focused on being aware of the content you’re taking in, how you’re engaging, whether you’re creating, you’re liking, watching, following, commenting and then notice what’s your relationship to all those different aspects of social media.
Mike:
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Natalie Tamburello:
I think assessing if you’re feeling overwhelmed, especially TikTok these days can just be so much information and so many opinions that are overlapping or contradictory, and you can’t filter through that information and you don’t even realize how overwhelmed you are, so taking stock of that. So if you’re a person who has a particular preference, I imagine that there’s people listening to this and saying, oh my god, I’m such an active social media user, or I’m such a passive social media user based on this conversation, what do healthy habits look like when it comes to social media, whether you’re a passive or an active user?
Tracy Cavaligos:
Great question. It’s really about that intentional focus about your usage and that can be one of the most impactful habits to build, and it’s never too late to start that. So check in with yourself, like, how much time are you spending on screens? Are you only socializing over social media? Are you getting a balance with like in-person relationships and social time and building community, or is it only virtually? How about the amount of time you’re spending like in, in-person activities, extracurriculars, or only virtual spaces? I hear a lot of like parents’ concern that their teens and young adults are really spending time on social media and they’re spending like all their time on social media. And again, it’s not a total negative, like it’s really gonna be about balance and that’s gonna look different for like each family and each family member. I like to think of this example of, think of your day, like if you or your kid are spending their day at school, they’re at an extracurricular, they’re coming home and doing their homework, and you know that’s probably gonna have to be online because of the world that we live in, you need your screens to do your work, and then they’re gonna spend some time relaxing or maybe socializing. And that relaxation or socializing is probably gonna include some social media or screen time. This might show like a pretty balanced day or like activities across spaces and social media time. However, like if you’re starting to notice you or your child are having a hard time focusing throughout their school day, they’re really having a hard time separating from their phone. If they’re in any like spare moment or break and they’re really kind of checking or not separating during important events, they might not engage in their extracurriculars or their time with their friends cause they’re on their phone, maybe it’s like impacting their sleep or how they’re starting to feel about themselves. These might be some good signs that new habits need to be considered. And for ourselves, it’s also important to check in how we’re feeling, like we said, how do you feel before you’re getting on social media? Are you having a hard time like not checking, staying away from it, what is it like during, are you doing that doom scrolling that Olivia was talking about, or are you feeling pretty enriched and enjoyable throughout it? And then what about after, like, are you feeling ashamed or upset about how much time you spent or now thinking about yourself in a different way? So really checking in with who you are and how you’re feeling.
Olivia McDonald:
I really love self-monitoring and self-monitoring might also look like using time monitoring apps. There’s lots of like free ones. There’s also stuff like on iPhones in particular, I’m not sure with Android users, cause I’m kind of like a die hard Apple user these days, but like you can usually check in or set timers to remind you like when it’s time to get off. Some people will have it where it’s set up where they like lose access to their social media for like a certain amount of time, even if it’s just five minutes just to reset themselves and if you’re a parent, that might also look like having parental controls on your kids’ phone that sets limits on times the day that they can access their social media. I know some parents have it set up so that kids can’t access their social media during school hours. And I think in a lot of ways that’s really beneficial, but this also isn’t to say that like you have to give yourself a hard limit or your kids a hard limit on how much screen time they can use. If you do, that’s great, but we kind of wanna keep in mind what Tracy was saying earlier, that the right balance is gonna look different for everyone and what’s right for you right now might also be different from what’s right from you six months from now or five years from now. The balance kind of changes a lot over time depending on what the external factors are, but from here if you wanna go like a little bit deeper and really self-evaluate social media’s impact on you, you might ask some like deeper reflection questions. So a lot like what Tracy was talking about earlier in terms of like how do you feel when you’re logged in, how do you feel when you log out? So you might ask yourself questions like, am I happy? Am I sad? Am I lonely? Am I inspired? And I really like to point out that you should be choosing an emotion word to define your experience rather than labeling it as good or bad or fine. A lot of us fall into that trap where we’re kind of like labeling it very generally, rather than dipping into our personal experience and knowing this can really help you understand your experience of social media better, as well as how you can keep an eye out for like, what aspects of social media are maybe not the most supportive of your mental health journey in this season of life. So, particularly if you don’t walk away with like positive experiences after being on social media you can then move into asking yourself why that might be. So like was there a particular person’s post that upset or triggered you? Do you feel like specific content isn’t aligned with your current values anymore or leads you down like a negative self-comparison rabbit hole? Is there a particular platform that impacts you more positively or negatively than others? Are you putting out your own content, getting caught up in the comments of people who are engaging on your posts, stuff like that, but then if you’re having positive experiences, we also wanna dive into that too and capitalize on it because we might be able to replicate that a little bit more often for ourselves. So what content are people are you feeling most energized or inspired by? Is there a particular reason? That is to say is like, is somebody emulating a lifestyle that you’re working toward? Are they sharing information that you’re super passionate about? Do they just have like a really refreshing perspective or even just like a nice energy that makes you feel really comfortable or seen or validated?
And other questions you can ask yourself is like, does putting out your own content fill your cup or does it really stress you out? In a reference to our earlier discussion of like passive versus active engagement, you can ask yourself things like, are you having positive experiences based on your engagement level or would creating more or less be beneficial to me? And from there, like there’s a really important caveat to checking in about your emotional experience of social media because you can’t and will not always feel good about the content you consume, which is kind of a tricky one, especially when you’re first learning to check in with yourselves because you can’t control all the factors or the information. You know, when you’re researching, you’re looking for a new perspective you might be opening yourselves up to things on purpose in order to kind of expand your world. And sometimes that might make us feel really upset or uncomfortable, but it’s important because it helps us to learn, open ourselves up to new opportunities, stuff like that. An important thing here is to check about the theme of your experience across spaces in the long term. Are you consistently feeling down, sad or angry after consuming or are you generally happy and inspired with the occasional discomfort coming up?
Tracy Cavaligos:
Mm-hmm.
Natalie Tamburello:
I think that’s a really important distinction in identifying your feelings, that last point you made, Olivia, which is, am I uncomfortable or feeling sad or upset because the content is upsetting me and it’s not aligned with my values, versus this is something new and different that I’m not used to seeing and it might be good for me in opening my perspective. So I think those are hard feelings to distinguish. And also I think it’s almost impossible, at least for me sometimes, and I know for a lot of Gen Z to distinguish whether your negative thoughts or feelings are coming from social media or from something that’s happening in your real life cause there’s a lot of crossover for those of us who grew up with phones and computers so easily accessible. So what advice would you give to people who don’t necessarily know if their mental health is being impacted by social media or something else?
Olivia McDonald:
Yeah, so from here it’s like now that you’ve asked yourself all these questions, you checked in with yourself and you’ve kind of checked in to see like are these major themes coming up and impacting you, you can get a little more specific about the elements that are related to mental health, and this might be a little bit repetitive to what some of what Tracy said earlier, but you wanna check in on things like, is it impacting your sleep? Are you scrolling before bed and having a hard time falling asleep or maybe just even losing track of time and you’re staying up until like two or three in the morning unintentionally. Are you feeling distracted and having a hard time concentrating during important tasks because you’re preoccupied with the idea of what’s going on on social media? Particularly when I think about teenagers, a lot of them have their notifications on, and those notifications can create a lot of distraction when they’re otherwise doing something that they need to like really focus their attention on. And then that kind of drops into like, how is it impacting your schoolwork? How is it impacting social relationships? Has anyone else said that they’re concerned about your social media use? And for teenagers it might not look like, oh, are my parents concerned? Like they’re annoying me and nagging me that I’ve been on it for too long, but like your friends are like, oh, you never put down your phone when we have lunch together. And that really bothers me, stuff like that. Are you feeling uncomfortable from being away from your phone? Can you log off for an entire school day or an entire workday without being super preoccupied by it? And then one of my most favorite questions is like, if you’re on a vacation or you’re somewhere, for even just like a day or two where there’s gonna be no or limited wifi, what is your initial gut response to that? Also another important one is are you only having important conversations over text or social media? Are you able to have those conversations in person as well? Because what happens when we mostly do it over text or social media is that we lose like the non-verbals tone of voice, body language, all of those cues, and we get out of practice of being in the same space as someone when we’re being vulnerable, if we’re only talking from behind a screen.
Tracy Cavaligos:
Mm-hmm. .
Natalie Tamburello:
Do you recommend you know, I see all the time people go on Facebook. I know that’s a little archaic, but saying, you know, I’m gonna detox. I’m gonna log off for a month and I’ll be back. Do you recommend that?
Olivia McDonald:
For some people that might be exactly what they need is you need a hard reset. It might not be like, oh, I need to take a month off or several months off, or even a couple of weeks. It might really just be like I’m going to log off for the weekend, or I’m going to not log in during the work week or even just, I’m gonna be logged out for my lunch break, and I’m gonna take a hard reset for my like downtime where I’m not just kind of like doom scrolling and spending all of my time like on lunch where I could be connecting with other people. So I think kind of like what we talked about earlier, that balance is different for everyone, and I think that it’s really beneficial if we all take a moment to log out and connect with our world and environment around us, without the opportunity for screens to interrupt that.
Tracy Cavaligos:
Yeah and that really hits what we wanted to talk about next a little bit too, Natalie. So social media is meant to be engaging, like it is literally built that way. So if you’re having a hard time balancing some of that social media and like you’re noticing it’s impacting how you’re feeling, try not to be hard on yourself and know that there’s so many different options to try out for support. Kind of jumping off what Olivia said, like we’d encourage you to maybe try some different stuff because what’s gonna work for one person might not work for you and what might work today might not be helpful in a couple months. So adjusting your goals and that’s totally okay, and reasonable. And like we said before too, like having some of those balanced activities, like spend time with people that you enjoy in person if you can, limit screen time before bed or when you wake up, maybe go old school and get like a physical alarm instead of having your phone in your room so that you have the temptation removed to use it at night or in the morning, and you can just have something else wake you up or make those efforts to have the impactful conversations in person, even when it’s scary like these are really important social skills and relational skills to be practicing, so try it out and get support from your friends and family like no one’s alone in this. We’re all trying to figure it out, and it can be helpful to, you know, have a buddy, so maybe it becomes a group thing when you’re hanging out with your friends, does everyone put their phones on silent for a little bit? Do you put them in the middle of the table while you’re having meals so that it’s a group agreement that we’re gonna do this together, and I think we all hear from a lot of young people that they’re really worried that if they start setting these boundaries or limiting their social media access or their phone access, that they’re gonna upset their friends or like miss out on something. And that’s a totally valid concern, right? Like you care about your friends, you care about your relationships, you wanna be there for them, and it’s really important to set some of these boundaries and like take care of yourself too. So like you are not a bad friend and you don’t care for taking time away from social media. And when you’re setting some of these boundaries, like communicate it, right, let them know what’s going on. So you could say, for example, like, I’m not gonna be using my phone after 10:00 pm, or I’m not gonna respond until after 8:00 am in the morning. Maybe like, I’m taking social media breaks throughout the day. I might not see your notification right away. I’m not mad or ignoring you, so that they know what’s going on. It’s important we all have downtime and not be expected to be available to other people constantly. There are some caveats, right, like if you’re working on a group project, it’s the day before it’s due. You’re probably gonna need to be in more contact with your group members, but it’s also okay to set a boundary and say like, I’m not gonna be available after 11 cause I’m going to be asleep, like you can’t reach me. And someone else’s like lack of planning in that moment is not your emergency. So it’s okay to set those boundaries and know that things are gonna change and fluctuate, and we’ve talked about it being like a very personal goal setting and trying to evaluate for your own life. So if you are connected with a mental health provider or therapist, you can definitely talk to us about that. We’re here to help you set some of those personalized goals and options that are really gonna help you succeed and make some of those habit changes.
Natalie Tamburello:
As I’m listening to you talk, I’m thinking these are also skills that you have to exercise in the workplace, right? Because work has become more and more centered around social media, and so if parents who are listening are probably thinking, oh my gosh, that’s how I feel about Slack, or that’s how I feel about emails and answering those and setting boundaries is difficult there. And so learning to set those boundaries when you’re young and you’re a teen through social media will only help you in the long run cause they’re just gonna be more boundaries you’re gonna have to set as an adult in the workplace. So, I keep thinking about that. And then also the conversation you mentioned around, you know, we’re all gonna agree about putting our phones on the table and when we’re having dinner, I think we forget often as adults that our behavior is being watched by our children, and so modeling our own social media habits in front of our kids so that, you know, we’re not being hypocritical and asking them to do something that we’re not.
Tracy Cavaligos:
Yeah and like we said it’s never too late to start building those habits. So you could this as a parent, you could do it as an adult anytime.
Olivia McDonald:
Yeah.
Natalie Tamburello:
So this is the point in the conversation where I like to ask you all as guests, what’s one takeaway you want our listeners to walk away with?
Tracy Cavaligos:
Social media is built to capture us and draw on our attention, like it is literally created to give you that dopamine reward that Olivia mentioned earlier, and it is hard to spend time away from social media. So like if you are having a really tough time or you’re not able to stop scrolling, like don’t be down on yourself. It was built that way and there’s lots of things you can do. The main thing is like we can really increase our self-awareness and know ourselves and our social media habits to get started, and then lots of new ways to practice some habits around social media and change.
Natalie Tamburello:
Mm-hmm.
Olivia McDonald:
I’m gonna say mine is probably a little bit more focused on like the self-reflection piece, on like your personal experience, establishing the boundaries that like you need, uh, so that social media doesn’t run your life and kind of like the comment that you made earlier, it’s just a practice, you’re practicing at it in order to create those boundaries. So give yourself lots of grace as you move on and recognize when you’re able to or need to change your boundaries and then also just seek support from your loved ones or professionals like Tracy was saying earlier. A lot of us are out here struggling with it, and you don’t have to feel like you’re alone.
Natalie Tamburello:
Thank you both. This has been such a great conversation, and I just wanna remind our listeners that CHC is here to support you. We have many free resources in addition to these podcast episodes, including our resource library, which is online, our parent support groups. We also have collaboratives for our school counselors and learning specialists who are listening, but if you’re in need of additional support, you can go to our clinical services page at chconline.org/clinicalservices, or you can reach out to our care team, which is careteam@chconline.org. And then also, if you’re a high school student or a college student listening and you have a learning difference or ADHD and you’re struggling with social media habits, you can always get support from our Schwab Learning Center, which works specifically with teens who have learning differences and ADHD, and you can find more information there at chconline.org/slc. Thank you both so much for this great conversation.
Tracy Cavaligos:
Thank you.
Olivia McDonald:
Thanks for having us.
Cindy Lopez:
Visit us online at podcasts.chconline.org. Make sure to subscribe to Voices of Compassion so you never miss an episode, and we’d love it if you’d leave us a rating and review. Have a question? Send us an email or a voice memo at podcasts@chconline.org. We’re here for you when you need us.
