Not surprisingly, women are at the forefront of this virtual world. Shakespeare wrote, “Why then the world’s mine oyster, which I with sword will open.” Just replace “sword” with “smartphone” and that girl from your sorority is now Insta-famous. Just look at 35-year-old-year old Oklahoma-born makeup expert Huda Kattan, who started a WordPress beauty blog in 2010, and in 2013 founded her cosmetics line Huda Beauty using social media as the tool that helped catapult her career. And by catapult, I mean she ranked #1 on the “2017 Influencer Instagram rich list” and is now worth $610 million. That’s a lot of mascara. And as most can only imagine, a LOT of screen time. Yet, as we post and scroll, unhealthy feelings of inadequacy creep in by playing (whether we mean to or not) the comparison game; with our bodies, businesses, friend groups, parenting and lives in general. It’s difficult to keep in mind that the people’s lives we see as we scroll look nothing like the pictures they post. Dr. Erin Vogel, a postdoc in the psychiatry department at the University of California who studies social media and wellbeing, has conducted research on the negative effects social media has on mental health, including depression, and her colleagues ran an experiment in which they made social media profiles that were supposedly real college students’ profiles. “We varied things like, how attractive and fit the person was in the pictures, and how many likes and comments they got on their posts. We found that what the [fictional] person was portraying and the social feedback that they got from other users affected how our participants saw themselves temporarily,” said Vogel. “People temporarily had lower self-esteem and felt worse about themselves after coming into our lab and looking at just one
or two of these attractive profiles.” Other studies show similar findings—one published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology established a causal relationship between social media use and loneliness and depression. Have we become conditioned to crave validation or “likes?” Do we really buy into the over-filtered photos dominating our feeds? Personally, I’ve had bursts of intense social media use, documenting my life in a way that has had me unable to watch a sunset, cheers my girls at happy hour, or experiment with an at-home food delivery service without taking all my “friends” on the journey. When I realized that, I found myself pulling back from endeavors that had me glued to my phone in order to stay at the forefront of people’s feeds. I was exhausted. The result of this was an income decrease on ventures that relied heavily on my online connection. In truth, it’s been liberating: Enjoying life’s little moments without feeling the need to document and share them. I’ll never forget finally tipping the needle to 1,000 Instagram followers and how happy I was — two days later I was back at 998. Tying our self worth to the quantifiable successes and losses of social media sets us up for disappointment. Navigating life without losing sight of what’s right in front of us can be a monumental feat in this virtual world. It’s a challenge to build your brand, garner success, fulfill the need to be connected, maintain a sense of privacy and do it all without constant internal comparison. So how do we find balance? I sat down to actually talk face to face (!) with three women who use their social media platforms for brand building. And yes, we had our devices tucked away to talk about the benefits and challenges of living life online…
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