Teenage Anxiety Increases with the Help of Social Media

The most popular app today among adolescents is Instagram, but teens also report that it’s the app causing them the most emotional problems. In a survey of over 1,500 teens and young adults, Instagram was cited over other apps such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat as having the greatest impact on their anxiety levels.¹ There’s a pivotal factor here that determines how much anxiety adolescents experience in social media use. How much are they emotionally invested in social media?

Emotional investment involves the level of vulnerability they share, the time they spend, and their level addictiveness. When teens get upset because they cannot check their messages frequently, it shows that they are too emotionally invested. For these teens, social media is an extremely important part of their life, and checking it is a high priority in their daily routine. In these scenarios, parents need to watch for problems that accompany high levels of emotional investment in social media use. 

Visual Problems. The concern here is not eyesight, but rather the way teenagers begin to view the world based on the social media they are viewing. One of the reasons teens cite Instagram as a depression inducing app is due to the picture-centered nature of the app. Girls especially report having lower body satisfaction when they are highly engaged on social media.² Teenagers live in a pornographic society, and they’re affected by it, even if they never view pornography. Being immersed in an image-based society steers one’s focus toward appearances rather than face-to-face interactions. Images steer the expectation of what one should look like, what is fun, what is acceptable, and what one’s goals should be. Pornography may be a bigger problem for boys than girls, but girls deal with the anxiety of keeping up with what attracts boys visually and behaviorally. And in many cases, what attracts the boys is unrealistic, due to a perspective acquired through the endless view of seductive images. 

Sleep-Deprivation. Researchers have pinpointed sleep deprivation as a common problem among teens who are both emotionally invested in social media and who suffer from higher levels of anxiety. They found that teens with poorer sleep quality were those who were the most invested in social media.³The more sleep-deprived adolescents become, the more they deal with depression.³ Teenagers need several quality hours of sleep in order to function emotionally. Some are sleep-deprived because they are engaged in social media late into the night. They have difficulty turning off their devices due to their high levels of emotional investment. 

Emotional Weakness. Low self-esteem, depression, and feelings of isolation are higher among teens who use social media at night.³ Adolescents who are emotionally invested develop feelings of isolation and cannot check social media enough. Therefore, they allow social media to steal valuable hours of sleep that jeopardize their ability to function emotionally. As a result of being sleep-deprived, they deal with self-esteem issues and feelings of being left out. 

Anxiety Bandwagons. Long before social media existed, teenagers had a tendency to talk with each other about their issues of anxiety in a way that spreads it rather than eliminating it. The technical word for this is corumination.⁴ Now that teens have social media, corumination has been taken to cyberspace. The problem is that when teens share their anxiety problems on social media, they are not sharing their problems with qualified counselors who can help them, but they are sharing their problems with other teens – the age group that thrives on drama. It’s not therapeutic for adolescents to discuss issues of depression with each other. Most teenagers lack the discernment to know when “anxiety talk” has gone too far and has entered an unhealthy stage, and teens lack the knowledge of a qualified adult to help another teen overcome emotional problems. 

In addition, it’s unhealthy for teenagers to be exposed to an abundance of knowledge about anxiety and other mental health issues, whether the information is about a personal friend or information about mental health problems in general. Too much information can plant seeds in one’s mind and result in emotional problems that never existed before becoming exposed to the mental health issue.

Each of these issues presents a big reminder to parents: adolescents require supervision. While we offer more freedom to our teens as they grow older, we must remember that they do not yet possess the self-control, self-restraint, and knowledge needed to tackle all of the emotional challenges they face during adolescence. Teens need reasonable rules and supervision to help them maintain emotional stability as they navigate through the latter years of their childhood. 

¹Chowdhry, A. (2019). Study says Instagram is ranked the worst social app for causing young people to feel depressed. Retrieved from www.forbes.com

²Shah, J., Das, P., Muthiah, N., & Milanaik, R. (2019). New age technology and social media; adolescent psychosocial implications and the need for protective measures. Retrieved from www.co-pediatrics.com.

³Woods, H.C. & Scott, H. (2016). #Sleepyteens: Social media use in adolescence is associated with poor sleep quality, anxiety, depression and low self-esteem. Journal of Adolescence, 51, 41-49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2016.05.008

 ⁴ Ehrenreich, S.E., & Underwood, M.K. (2016). Adolescents’ internalizing symptoms as predictors of the content of their Facebook communication and responses received from peers. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 2, 227-237. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/tps0000077

Why Is Social Media Making Adolescents Feel Lonelier?

Teenagers may think that social media will cure their feelings of loneliness or quench their desire to be included, but it’s having the opposite effect. Researchers¹, as well as experienced parents², are finding that social media spurs negative emotions at a greater rate than healthy feelings, especially among teens ranging in ages from 14 to 17. Since teens have strong desires to fit in with their peers and be with them as much as possible, it seems natural to believe that social media would quench that thirst. But researchers are finding that the more adolescents are engaged in social media, the more likely they are to experience loneliness, feelings of depression, and anxiety³. 

Fear of missing out (FoMo) and loneliness is higher among adolescents who check their social media accounts most often. Researchers found that the more teens checked their social media accounts and the more accounts they had, the more teens reported feelings of loneliness and depression¹. There are two plausible explanations about why this occurs: 1) Students see positive things about their peers and they don’t think their lives measure up. 2) Teens see favorable projections of their friends, and they are afraid that they will not be as well liked. As a result of both of these factors, teens begin to experience depressing feelings associated with FoMo.

Understanding the link between social media use and depressive feelings offers some insight about why adolescents spend extreme amounts of time on social media when they are allowed. The effect has more in common with drinking alcohol than water: it becomes addictive rather than quenching. It begins with a desire to mingle socially, the same reason most adults enter the world of social media. They want to stay in touch with their friends and share their life with others. But as their social media exposure increases, their FoMo increases, which pinpoints a shift in why their cravings for social media increases. Adolescents even experience withdrawal symptoms if they don’t have enough access. As their motivation turns negative – to alleviate their FoMo, loneliness, and anxiety – they no longer experience pure enjoyment. Instead, teens begin to habitually check their accounts in order to cure these negative emotions. 

Parents are becoming increasingly concerned about how much time their children are spending in front of screens and what may result from spending so much time online. The Pew Research Center found that a large majority of parents are concerned, but the majority of parents also trust their ability to monitor their children’s online activity. Of the parents surveyed, 9 of 10 believe they can properly teach their teen healthy online behavior, and almost 9 of 10 parents believe they can properly monitor their children². It’s feasible that most parents know what constitutes good or bad content, how to install a filter, or how to check the browser history. However, do most parents understand the emotional implications? 

Parents would be wise to realize that content is not the only thing that needs to be supervised when it comes to social media exposure. The amount of time engaged in social media as well as the emotional implications have to be considered if parents want their children to enjoy an emotionally healthy childhood. In most cases, the safest option is for adolescents to stay off of social media, especially the younger they are. It’s healthier for them to build face-to-face relationships and enjoy being with their friends in person. Your children may feel like they are missing out by not being on social media, but weigh those feelings with other factors that should be considered:

• Is it really possible to be included in everything? Will social media be feeding your child the unrealistic idea that it’s always possible to be included?
• Is it really possible for your child to never feel left out? Will social media do more to feed your child information igniting jealousy and loneliness, rather than contentment?
• Is your child really going to build healthy relationships through social media? Will social media meet your child’s natural need for friendship or just make them think they have poor friendships?

Parents need to be aware that adolescents do not interpret information on social media like an adult, and in many respects, teens cannot engage without it being emotionally detrimental. Given that FoMo and loneliness increase, not decrease, with adolescent social media use, it’s evident that children process information differently than adults. While other detrimental factors need to be considered as well, such as sleep-deprivation, depression, body image, and self-esteem (these will be discussed in a forthcoming blog post), FoMo and loneliness are two good reasons for parents to either seriously limit social media, or just play it safe by banning it altogether.

            

¹ Barry, C.T., et al. (2017). Adolescent social media use and mental health from adolescent and parent perspectives. Journal of Adolescence, 61, 1-11. 

² Anderson, Monica. “How parents feel about and manage their teens online behavior and screen time.” https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/03/22/how-parents-feel-about-and-manage-their-teens-online-behavior-and-screen-time/

³Woods, H.C., Scott, H. (2016) #Sleepyteens: Social media use in adolescence is associated with poor sleep quality, anxiety, depression and low self-esteem. Journal of Adolescence, 51, 41-49.

Establish a Complaint-Free Home

It’s time to end the complaining, and this applies to parents as well as the kids. Certainly, there will be times when life disappointments grieve us to the point that we have to get our feelings off our chest. In such a case, it’s understandable to vent to someone, as long as our perspective is reasonable and it doesn’t constitute gossip. However, if you “vent” twice, then you are probably complaining. If you are a parent, don’t tolerate it with your children, and don’t participate either. 

Kids develop a complaining problem because, a) they are permitted to complain, and b) they hear adults do it endlessly. On that note, understand that being a parent does not make complaining about your children excusable or healthy. To motivate us to end the complaining, I’ve offered four reasons worth pondering: 

1.    Complaining is living in the negative. If we intend to cultivate a pleasant home environment, it will require deliberate action. Self-regulation, self-control, and perspective are absolutely necessary. Let’s teach our children that words have consequences, and that includes tone not just the words themselves. Cultivating a pleasant home to live in requires every member of the family to learn how to handle disappointments – complaining is not a helpful option. Scripture couldn’t be clearer on this issue, “Do all things without murmurings and disputings” (Phil. 2:14). In other words, problems may need to be addressed, but without complaining.

2.    Complaining is harmful to relationships. It’s true that misery loves company, but who wants to be around misery all the time? Children need to learn that complaining people do not win friends. Instead, they spread negative attitudes and eventually alienate themselves from people who seek healthy relationships. There is a point where a person complains enough that they are labeled a complainer, and at that point, others only want their company when they are in a complaintive mood as well. Rather than alienating people who could be a positive influence, become the type of person who “ministers grace” with words (Eph. 4:29).  

3.    Complaining is a distraction from a solution. Problems are resolved when a solution is formed, not when the focus stays on the problem. There may be times when problems need to be worked out in conversation with an appropriate person, but the conversation should be driven by a plan to improve rather than counter-productive complaining. This will require parents to teach children what to do instead of complaining. For instance, help kids put a plan into action to resolve conflicts with friends, rather than listen to endless complaining. Instead of allowing grumbling about how difficult school is, talk to the teacher about a plan of action for improving and help your children focus on the game plan. 

4.     Complaining is failure to submit to God’s will. Not all life situations meet God’s approval; nevertheless, God allows them to happen. It may be God’s desire to permit your undesirable circumstances to provide you with an opportunity for growth. We grow spiritually and emotionally after enduring an undesirable situation, attacking the problem, and overcoming it. Never is it God’s will for us to harbor the self-destructive attitude that manifests itself in complaining. 

Children will need help learning this critical life lesson – complaining assumes the role of a helpless victim and thwarts opportunities to resolve the problem. It’s in a child’s nature to complain about a problem in hopes that an adult will fix it. Sadly, it works at times because the adult only wants to stop the complaining. However, reinforcing this type of behavior fails to teach children how life in the real world works. Neither does it teach them how to live a happy life. Ending the complaining will create a much more positive atmosphere in your home, and it will greatly help your children develop happier dispositions. 

-->