You don’t need a celebrity to inform you that women are underserved in the health area. Women’s health and well-being have become a global problem in the past year, as they encounter even more obstacles on the route to general health and well-being.
Because of the complexity of gender discrepancies, a “trend” label would be an understatement of the extent of the problem (we could spend days discussing the barriers to health care for nonbinary and trans folk). There is an increasing need for fresh attention to the needs of women and girls in the year 2022, as it appears navigating wellness (and life) as a female is more difficult than ever.
New documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal suggest Meta (previously known as Facebook) has access to some disturbing social media data. To give you a taste of what’s to come: Meta Platforms Inc.’s Instagram (which is owned by 32% of the surveyed teen females) made them feel worse when they felt horrible about their bodies, according to the study. According to a study, 13% of British youths and 6% of American teens who reported suicidal ideation blamed Instagram.
A possible explanation for why girls may be more susceptible to Instagram than other genders is that the platform is effectively socializing them at an earlier age. When it comes to girls, it’s nothing new that they are bombarded with images of diet culture and photoshopped celebrity photos, all while having face-slimming features and “beauty” filters at their fingertips. Having unrealistic expectations can lead to disaster when they finally take their eyes off of the computer.
Add some social comparisons to the mix, shall we? “Instagram allows people to offer a highlight reel of their lives,” says psychologist and author Ethan Kross, Ph.D., who is also the father of two young daughters and author of Chatter: The Voice in Our Head: Why It Matters and How to Harness It. The frequent exposure to others’ glorified lifestyles makes it easy to start reflecting on how “ordinary” your own life may be, and this can have some bad repercussions for your own well-being and well-being.
It’s important to note that social media isn’t entirely terrible. Creating a vulnerable community can benefit greatly from this, as we’ll see in a moment. “We know from a study that people are particularly motivated to communicate their feelings with other people when they are experiencing powerful emotions,” explains Kross. There are barriers that prevent us from revealing our deepest feelings when they’re at their peak in the real world. While social media has the ability to benefit, it also has the potential to harm, as Facebook’s statistics show. What can we do to keep the good aspects of social media while letting go of the bad? According to Kross, this is the way things will go in the future.
When it comes to using technology to help ourselves feel better rather than worse, he says, “We haven’t really had a playbook.” “However, we’re beginning to create and perfect our playbook. The task now is to spread the knowledge we’ve gained to others so they can benefit from it.”
