Activity #6: Avoiding Overthinking and Social Comparison

Do your newsfeeds look like this? (And in case there are gullible people out there, unfortunately none of this is true.)

It’s April, which means that our newsfeeds are flooded with internship and job acceptances and other exciting plans people have for their summers. When I’m feeling insecure about my own prospects, then I particularly dread seeing these updates, even if I’m simultaneously so excited for the people posting them.

And, yes, there’s an algorithm that will make these sorts of posts appear at the top of your newsfeed.

Career plans only address one aspect of social media anxiety. Let’s not forget body image insecurities or the effects on our self-esteem.

Last Friday I decided to delete my social media accounts.

Or, rather, deactivate. The permanence of deleting seems a little dramatic. Within a few hours I noticed how much more calm and relieved I felt.

So, goodbye Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. It shouldn’t be such a big deal, but it feels like it is. (I’ll only be logging into Twitter for #smpasocial.)

I’ve taken brief absences off a platform at a time, and those experiences have made me agree with Ezra Koenig here (a thought he shares, of course, through social media):

Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness, has done several studies on the correlation between rumination and unhappy people, and the overall conclusion:

“If you are someone plagued by ruminations, you are unlikely to become happier before you can break that habit.”

I expect that taking a break from social media will make a huge difference in the amount of time I spend ruminating, but I don’t want to be off social media forever. So here are some strategies to avoid overthinking and social comparison beyond taking a break from all of our favorite apps:

1. Cut loose.

• Distract yourself: put all your attention towards an engaging activity.

• Tell yourself “Stop!” whenever you find yourself ruminating.

• Assign all your worrying to a 30-minute period each day. (If you catch yourself worrying outside of it, it’s easier to tell yourself “no” when you know you’ll be able to think about it later.)

• Talk to someone about your thoughts and troubles.

• Write out your ruminations.​

2. Act to solve problems: address the concrete issues that might inspire your overthinking.

3. Dodge overthinking triggers.

• Write out the situations that appear to trigger your overthinking (places, times, and people).

• For me and probably a lot of you all too? This is social media.​

4. Take in the big picture.

• Ask yourself, will this matter in a year? (In the rare case that it does, think about what it will teach you.)

• Distance yourself from your overthinking by visualizing your problem in the context of space and time. For example, Lyubomirsky says, think of yourself as a tiny dot on Earth in the middle of the Milky Way, which is itself a dot when compared to the entirety of the universe.)

Well, I hope these strategies help you avoid overthinking and social comparison. Let me know in the comments!