Social Media The New Anxiety Essays - Psychology, Psychiatry, RTT

Social Media: The New Anxiety Social media is beginning to control not only our lives but also our time. Controlling our lives by what we may do everyday including our job and our relationships with friends, coworkers, and loved ones. Controlling our time by how we spend the days of our life. Social media is cutting into our lives and time by beginning to be the center of attention meaning that it is our main focus . Social media has become a large part of our world and not all of it is negative but there are some very negative effects that social media has on our population. Social media can cause many people to struggle with body image, popularity issues, separation issues, and the fear of missing out. These eventually can lead into anxiety. This type of anxiety is called social media-induced anxiety. Social media-induced anxiety can affect all ages but affects the youth and young adult population most. Social media is a large cause in anxiety and it needs to be controlled. Nomophobia. The fear of being out of contact with a mobile device or phone. When this phobia occurs, many freak out and panic. Some might even have panic attacks or throw fits. From experience, many of my younger cousins and family friends cannot go without their phones. They get very upset. I always ask them why they cannot go without their phones and it never fails for them to say that they have streaks with people on snapchat and that they must see what everyone else is doing. Most people cannot even be away from their phone when they are sleeping. It is hard to leave the online world out of reach at any time and this is the main source of how our population starts to become anxious. This feeling of uneasiness that my family members and many members of society feel when they are unable to access the online world can then lead to disconnection anxiety. This loss of connection could be caused by an internet outage, a trip to a place that might not have wi-fi, the experiment of trying to reduce the amount of time they spend on the internet. This could cause all ages discomfort and it could range from mild to very severe. Tarsha states that "Social networking technology has given rise to a unique form of anxiety in the adolescent population: the fear of missing out ( FoMO )." (The Role of Existential Therapy In The Prevention of Social Media-Driven Anxiety 382). FoMo is when people desire to know and be connected to what others are doing. This is a large portion that adds to social media-induced anxiety because the youth are always wanting to know what their friends or even enemies are up to. They are always wanting to one up the other which could not only cause anxiety and sadness but hatred and evil. This can be caused by a void they might have that technology and social media fills for a short time. It can also add a lot of pressure due to the fact that the teens are constantly trying to have the better or best post. "That's what's annoying about social media! I get frustrated that I have to find just the right picture and post it on just the right platform. There's so much unnecessary pressure, and people take it so seriously, including me. Sometimes I'll just be like, Why am I doing this? It's an app! Now I've started to share only if it's to spread something happy going on."-Kiana. ( Viggiani 100) Because many people think like Kiana, social media has become about how happy and well everyone's lives are going. Now they might not be as obsessed with posting perfect pictures but they redirect the anxiety to making sure they are happier than their followers or worry that they do not have a good life. As they scroll through their social media all they see is how fantastic someone's vacation was or how perfect someone's family and friends are. It is impossible for someone to be happy all the time or even have good things happen to them consistently, but it