Social Media Made Me Unhappy, So I Stopped Using It

The result was an improvement to my mental health

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I’ve always wrestled a little bit with insecurity.

When I was a teenager it was very severe. Even in my early 20s I would still get quite a bit of anxiety either worrying about what others thought of me or comparing myself to others.

Even today, comparing myself to others is something I have to be very careful of, but when it used to be really bad.

I also used to be completely hooked on social media. When I was in Middle School it was Myspace, in High School it was Facebook, and by the time I was in college, it was Facebook and Instagram.

I’d post and then look at my phone every second to see how many notifications I was getting.

I loved every second of the dopamine I’d get from seeing that little red flag on the app. It was validating and made me feel like I measured up in some way. But there was an even more troubling side to my social media fixation.

I was constantly comparing myself to everyone else and it was making me depressed. This continued into my mid-20s.

To be clear, I’ve never been diagnosed with depression but I’ve wrestled with it in some shape or form for most of my life. It was much…