Social media apps can help you stay connected with family and friends and even meet new people. You get to share posts of things you are doing and see what other people are doing. But when downloading the apps, you don’t realize what an impact they can have. It can affect your mental health and create an increase in anxiety and depression. Social media can also create isolation and not wanting to go outside or hang out with friends and family. 

One thing that social media can do is make you feel like less of a person because there is a lot of negativity that goes around. There could be a large number of people being positive, but there is always a small percentage of negativity that people have to give. People don’t realize that a small negative comment can make a person feel sad. People don’t realize the impact they have on someone else. Most people don’t know how social media affects them since they might not experience this, but some ways to know if it’s affecting you is if you start to feel anxious, spend more time on your phone, compare yourself to others, and notice how your job, school, relationships are affected by it.

A majority of the people who download social media are young people who just do it for fun, and most of the impact that it has on them is creating an image of what they should look like. There are a lot of online role models who are skinny, have clear skin, are on a diet, etc. It makes people start to think that they should also look like that. Some stop eating to “lose weight” and try to do anything they can to look like the people they see online.

Social media is full of people who try to harm others, not everyone there is friendly or cares enough to leave something positive. There’s always something negative that people have to say. The main impact that social media has is causing depression. Studies show that if a person feels isolated, they are more likely to use social media more frequently. 

It also takes away the time that kids spend on activities that they used to do. Social media distracts people from doing their hobbies and exercising. It also distracts them from doing their homework or studying for their upcoming tests. This can cause them to fall behind in their classes and start performing poorly in school. It can also cause a lack of sleep since they ruin their sleeping schedule by scrolling through social media. 

There are many ways to protect your mental health. The main one would be blocking the cruel people and reporting them. Keep talking to your friends and family in person and not just through text, it will help with your social skills and you will feel less isolated. Also, taking a break from social media can be good. Not fully deleting the app but setting a timer in it for how long you want to spend in the app so you won’t be spending too much time on your phone.