Its no big secret that body image and self-esteem are huge issues for young women today and the rise of social media has fueled this epidemic of plummeting confidence. We’ve learned to base our own self-worth on how many likes we get and how we compare to others who pop up on our feed. It’s a toxic behavior and it effects the mental, and sometimes physical, health of the young women who are exposed to it. 

The danger of social media is it allows us to pick and choose what parts of our life we share with others. We can create an image of ourselves that we think will earn the approval of our followers, even if its not an accurate representation of who we really are. We can choose only to show the fun and exciting things in our life, and not the dull parts that make up a majority of our time. And every photo we see on our feed is exactly that, an exciting snapshot taken from an average life.  

She can spend hours debating if a photo is good enough to post. She scrolls through a dozen pictures of the same thing, analyzing every tiny detail and choosing the best one. Then she’ll try on every available filter, and mess with the lighting, contrast and saturation. Finally, the photo is ready for the eyes of Instagram, but her work is not done. She has to come up with a caption. Should it be clever or cute? Emojis or no emojis? Maybe she should use all lowercase so it doesn’t look like she’s trying too hard. She goes through all of this and when its finally posted, she carefully monitors the number of likes it gets. She might even delete it if she feels it isn’t good enough. 

I remember the first time Instagram envy killed my self-esteem. I was scrolling through my feed and her handle popped up tagged in a photo. I clicked on her out of curiosity and her profile literally blew my mind. Her Instagram was colorful and exotic. She seemed like the most cultured person on the planet. She was beautiful, her boyfriend was gorgeous, and her life was perfect. After I made it to the bottom of her page, I clicked on my own profile and deleted almost half of my photos.

It may seem extreme, but its not uncommon. Girls everywhere face the same problem and its killing their self-esteem. Constantly comparing our own lives to the altered lives we see on social media makes us feel bad. Our feeds fill up with carefully organized photos of latte art or Cancun beach bikini shots. Beautifully edited selfies of pretty girls make us notice our own flaws in the mirror. And we do our best to keep up, so we post pictures laughing with friends we barely know and take videos of concerts that we can’t really experience, because we’re worried about catching the perfect 10 seconds for our Snapchat story. The photos we see make us feel inferior, and the edited photos we post almost feel like lies. We’re impressed by the picture-perfect lives of the people we follow, and it seems impossible for us to keep up. 

This problem will not go away anytime soon. Social media is becoming an even bigger part of our lives. Not only does it control our social lives, but it’s even beginning to creep into our professional lives as well. If social media is going to be a permanent fixture in our lives, we need to learn to separate our self-esteem and confidence from our online profiles. We are not who we pretend to be on social media and neither is anyone else. The next time you are scrolling through your feed feeling sorry for yourself, remember that nothing is as perfect as it seems.