Self Care In The Digital World

Image via @BBCBodyPositive on Instagram! Their page is one we love for practicing positive, image related self-care.

Mindlessly scrolling through Instagram, my eyes flicker to the image of some not-quite-super model. I take in her toned physique: her arms, her stomach, her legs, and just like that, I’m sucked in. The next hour is filled with scrolling, and inevitably, comparison. Her brand name bags, her perfect bangs, the sort of idealistic, carefree look in her eyes; from the outside looking in, she has everything I could ever want. And just like that, another evening is lost to self-loathing. 

As a culture, this is something we all find ourselves dealing with. The biggest con of the instant age of media is that we can ruin our own days in a matter of clicks, and I’ve watched myself do it far too many times. At first, it’s nothing more than innocent curiosity, we want to know more about the face that we have just scrolled past. But soon it borders into obsession. We, as a generation, want to keep up with the digital age but with that comes viewing things, people, or companies that make us feel insecure. In the age of double tap validation we’re all looking for what we think everyone else has, without considering a simple truth: the feed that you’re looking at is heavily curated.

With anything, we want to put our best foot forward, and social media is no exception. We tweak selfies, take multiple, adjust lighting, filters, and captions, until we’re satisfied with who we want everyone else to think we are. But so often we forget that everyone else does this too – we assume everyone else lives picture perfect lives and that we’re the hot-mess outlier. Not only is this logic deeply flawed, it’s a toxic narrative that allows the digital age to amplify our insecurities by letting us convince ourselves that we’re the only ones that feel this way.  

Let’s double back to my initial situation, my mindless scrolling through some would be models feed. During my deep dive into self-loathing I never consider that she too did all the things I did while I was on Instagram. It never crosses my mind that she spent ages adjusting her lighting, I never wonder if she’s blurring her skins texture with any number of apps marketed at perfectly normal human skin, my mind never mulls over the possibility that she, too, took a hundred similar selfies before finding something with a good bones ripe and ready to edit, and worse of all: I never wonder if this beautiful girl is struggling with her own insecurities. If she, too, scrolls until she’s scrolled past her own worth like I used to.

In the age of the instant, being plugged while checking in on yourself can be tough to say the least. We want to be accessible and navigate the world as it grows, but this often comes at the expense of our own mental health. For this problem I offer a seemingly simple solution: curate, curate, curate. If something on your feed doesn’t inspire you, motivate you, or keep you steadfast on the path you have chosen for yourself, it needs to go. Hell, if something doesn’t make you smile it can go. Get rid of anything that makes you feel less than great and don’t look back. For people you can’t unfollow, for whatever reason, the mute button is your friend. Utilize it mercilessly to make your online experience as painless as possible. You deserve to make your online landscape a place where you feel most comfortable and secure with yourself, not a digital dressing room where you pick apart your perceived flaws. 

If anything is going to stick with you long after this article is done, let it be this: everyone you meet is curating themselves. As we move and navigate the digital age, there are parts of ourselves that we leave out. These parts might be the way that we really look, feel, or identify – but they’re getting left out in order for us to conform to what we think is acceptable, and while we do this, everyone else is following suit. The thing is, we are acceptable. We are all worthwhile individuals that are worthy of love, and more importantly, self-love. If the only act of self-care you engage in today is stripping your social media of things that hurt you, I’m proud of you. As a society, we need to take baby steps to undoing all the harm the digital age has done to our psyches, and if you’ve already committed to step one, that’s something to be proud of. 

Thank you so much to Hayat Abdulhakim (who you can find on Instagram here!) for this beautiful contribution that so many of us can learn from in bettering our relationships with the Internet.