How Unfollowing Instagram Accounts Affected My Anxiety

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A couple months back I was laying in bed and scrolling Instagram to pass time and I remember thinking, “Wow, I follow a lot of random people and stuff I’m not even into”.

I’ve noticed this before, but what I never considered was the correlation this had with my anxiety. I’ve faced a lot of anxiety for most of my adult life and now I was starting to understand where a lot of it might’ve come from.

I looked at what I was scrolling through including the Instagram Explore page. All the different cars, the different bodybuilders and IG fitness “models” with overly provocative photos and pointless celebrity news. A kaleidoscope of noise on my screen.

Noise meaning interruptions, distractions, or anything which isn’t relevant to my interests.

Yes, I do love cars, but not the cars they were showing me. Body building is one of my hobbies, but all I was getting were IG “models” using social media to advertise their revealing workout clothes, weight loss teas and other fitness gimmicks. The point is, my social media’s attempt to give me relevant content I wanted to see was getting messy and it was because I was following everything and that’s where a lot of my anxiety was coming from.

The Gap

I was satisfied with where I was in life. For instance, I was satisfied with my car, how I performed in the gym, and how I looked. However, the more time I spent scrolling, the more I saw a gap. The gap between where I was and where I thought I wanted to be.

After scrolling through new shiny wheels, I decided mine were no longer any good. After seeing many bigger and better bodybuilders, I felt I wasn’t working hard enough. After seeing what other people were wearing, I decided I had to go shopping.

The funny thing about all those thoughts is that just a few minutes before picking up my phone, I was genuinely happy with all these things in my life. Nothing was really missing but now there was and it made me very uneasy until I got them.

I started feeling very much in simulation rather than myself. If you’ve ever played The Sims, you’ll know what I’m talking about. I felt the decisions I was making from small to big, weren’t truly mine. Just like The Sims, I felt I was being controlled by someone; controlling what I wear, what or who to fantasize about, what I buy and overall how to live my life.

What happened there is an example of how while media isn’t the sole mediator of culture, it certainly is a major contributor to it and a place where we spend a lot of time, an average of two hours and 22 minutes per day (on social networking only) to be exact. Contemporary media is a place where all messages are repeated and found everywhere we turn. So, whether the message is good, bad or even worthwhile our attention, it becomes the truth. This is where our responsibility comes in. The responsibility of teaching ourselves how to view and consume media.

Our Responsibility

We shouldn’t look at contemporary media as the arbiter of all our problems in ourselves and our society, instead we must look at it as an influential power. And just like anything with power, misuse of it can be detrimental. We have to remember that it has revolutionized the availability and accessibility of information whether for educational or entertainment purposes.

Contemporary media has allowed us to do things like pick up new skills and knowledge with unmatched accessibility and convenience. It has delivered news to us rapidly. It’s given us viral content, whether it’s comedy or controversy. Our responsibility lies in what we choose to consume. Are we going to use social media to learn and become better than we were yesterday, or are we going to swipe unconsciously and be negatively influenced by trends or ideas that don’t even appeal to us? The point is, contemporary media can bring us a lot of good or bad, and I realized I could make it a lot better for myself.

And That’s Why I Unfollowed

Several studies have shown correlations, with some even showing causation, between higher social media use and poorer mental health. Alongside anxiety, respondents experienced higher levels of depression, loneliness and isolation, lower self-esteem and even suicidal thoughts.

The University of Pennsylvania asked 140 graduates to either continue their regular use of Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat or to limit the use of each social media app to 10 minutes per day. To make the study more reliable, participants provided data from their phones showing the exact time spent on each app.

The study uncovered that the respondents who limited their social media usage saw significant improvements in their mental health after the three-week period including reports of less FOMO and anxiety.

The author of the study, Melissa G. Hunt, stated the following:

“Some of the existing literature on social media suggests there’s an enormous amount of social comparison that happens. When you look at other people’s lives, particularly on Instagram, it’s easy to conclude that everyone else’s life is cooler or better than yours.”

This applies to topics including consumerism and self-esteem by making decisions based on what we see. For instance, in terms of consumerism and commerce, shiny new wheels or the next generation smartphone became one of my top priorities because thats what I needed to live that social media fabricated life.

Self-esteem is another concern where young people are seeing an artificial, flashy and very shallow idea of success through their screens. Instagram’s ability to make everything look more glamorous than it is, made fresh graduates like myself feel more anxious and disappointed that we haven’t reached a certain point of our lives yet, when in reality we’re right where we need to be and there is no time constraint for achieving success. In my previous article regarding the anxieties associated with being a fresh graduate, I stated that “Real success is doing everything you can to move yourself into the direction of building the life that YOU want”, which is quite different than what social media has been teaching us. Social media has created a narrower definition of what success looks like, and is quite unrealistic or appears more glamorous than it is.

It doesn’t stop there, social media hasn’t failed in influencing how users feel about their own appearance. Another study from York University in Canada found that young women felt worse about themselves after they were asked to interact with a post of someone whom they perceived as more attractive.

The 120 undergraduate women were asked to leave a comment on either a peer they felt was more attractive or a family member who they did not feel was as attractive. Study author Jennifer Mills stated the following:

“The results showed that these young adult women felt more dissatisfied with their bodies… They felt worse about their own appearance after looking at social media pages of someone that they perceived to be more attractive than them. Even if they felt bad about themselves before they came into the study, on average, they still felt worse after completing the task.”

The findings illustrate the correlation between how an individual feels about themselves after their exposure to social media. This is known as the “social comparison” factor, which is linked to poorer wellbeing regardless of whether the comparison is to your favor or not. In other words, even if we focus on those that we perceive as less smart or less attractive, we still negatively affect our mental health.

Personally, I’ve experienced this when scrolling through workout videos and fitness models that were very well built. I’ve always had a certain body and fitness goal in mind, however, upon scrolling I saw other physiques that looked built beyond imagination and far fetched, particularly for some of the athletes’ young ages. I instantly felt overwhelmed, questioning my own appearance. I’d ask myself questions like “have I been working hard enough?”, “am I where I should be?”, “should I try something else?” The self-doubt started gushing through until I took time to think critically. I analyzed what I was seeing and found that what I was seeing was not a realistic representation. For starters, many of those athletes were on steroids. And regardless of steroid or any drug use, many were athletes long before I was, making the attempt to compare even more unrealistic, but social media has its way of only showing the result without the process.

I realized that all those Instagram pages were noise; irrelevant interruptions crowding my feed and clouding my mind making me forget that it’s me vs. me and nobody else matters. I had to unfollow and detach myself from that artificial atmosphere.

I gradually did the same for other pages. I continued to cars, clothes and worked my way to “friends”. Of course I don’t mean real, close friends, but people I barely know, some of which I don’t even like, and I knew on a deeper, sub conscious level they were affecting me somehow, whether it was the social comparison factor, or loss of privacy lessening my sense of freedom and affecting the quality of my content. At the end of the day, we were friends just because we followed each other on Instagram, and not the other way around, so they also had to go.

The Outcome

My social media was far cleaner, particularly Instagram, which is where I was spending a lot of time. Cleaner in the sense that I’m genuinely entertained and informed by what I see.

I could now see my character through my feed, which is what I wanted. I follow only the car pages I’m genuinely interested in, making my decision of what car, or car parts I wanted to get much easier and effective. I follow local gyms and athletes, some of which I know personally, meaning I know more about their journey, training routines and how they actually look. I see much more of my real friends meaning my usage of social media is not only less time consuming but enjoyable in knowing I’m logging in to talk to friends instead of being influenced by people that I could almost call strangers.

To add to the benefits, usage of social media and all contemporary media has added value to my life as it should. In helping me make decisions, rather than make them for me. In educating me rather than clouding my mind. In helping me connect with and maintain my network. As I mentioned, contemporary media has given us value through knowledge with accessibility and convenience, and I now could reap the benefits with just small changes to my usage.

I write about media in the digital world and how our lives are affected by it while providing plans and solutions and how to use the media’s influential nature to our advantage throughout our daily lives.