Do You Find Social Media Emotionally Exhausting?

Throughout life, from the cradle to the grave, we experience a multitude of emotions. Some positive, like the emotion of joy when falling in love, the deep love felt when holding a newborn baby, or excitement when getting our dream job. At some times in our lives, we will also experience negative emotions, like sadness when losing a loved one, fear when faced with illness, and hopelessness when falling on hard times.

How Our Emotions Work

According to The American Psychological Association, emotion is a complex reaction pattern involving experiential, behavioral, and physiological elements. When we’re able to correctly read and interpret our emotions, they provide us with lots of important information. For example, emotions can help us to know how to respond to people and situations and how to make good decisions. Our emotions can also help us to determine who to be close to, who to trust, what principles and values we should follow, and what we like and don’t like.

On the flip side, emotional dysregulation refers to difficulties managing and responding to intense emotional experiences in a flexible and socially acceptable manner. People experiencing emotional dysregulation feel emotions more intensely, for longer durations, have frequent mood swings, and respond to emotions with behaviors that are extreme and socially inappropriate, like outbursts of anger, crying spells, or impulsive actions. People who experience emotional dysregulation often struggle with maintaining relationships and are more vulnerable to depression, anxiety, and suicidality.

Emotional Dysregulation and Social Media

Social media has added another dimension to our already emotional lives. Just like in real life, interacting in digital spaces and scrolling through sites like Instagram, X, (formerly known as Twitter), Reddit, TikTok, Snapchat, and Facebook can create a barrage and rollercoaster of emotions.

Constant exposure to curated and idealized versions of other people's lives has been shown to lead to negative self-comparisons, causing feelings of inadequacy, envy, and low self-esteem. Cyberbullying and harassment can cause significant emotional distress, leading to anxiety, depression, and suicidality. Obsessively checking in about social events, posts, and activities contributes to a fear of missing out (FOMO) and being left out. FOMO has been linked to feelings of loneliness and dissatisfaction. The design of social media platforms encourages prolonged and repetitive use, leading to compulsive behaviors that inhibit real-life social interactions and emotional well-being. Mood swings based on overreliance on likes, comments, and shares for personal validation can make users more sensitive to online interactions and feedback. Lastly, several research studies have shown excessive social media use disrupts healthy sleep patterns, causing insomnia which negatively impacts our emotions and our ability to regulate them.

How DBT Can Help

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) in general is a type of cognitive-behavioral therapy designed to help individuals manage and reduce intense emotions, self-destructive behaviors and thoughts, and improve their relationships. It has four primary components: mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. One key goal of DBT is to help individuals develop a balance between acceptance and change, to help individuals accept themselves as they are while working towards meaningful change in order to live a skillful and worthwhile life.

Below are four DBT skills that can help when you experience emotional dysregulation while logged on to social media:

1. Take a non-judgmental approach to social media. Focus on the facts without coloring them with your personal opinions. Remember that “good” and “bad” judgments are relative. Sometimes what appears to be desirable, such as certain friends’ posts on social media platforms, can actually be suffering in disguise. For example, a friend posting a bunch of selfies might actually mean they are suffering from low self-esteem or loneliness.
2. Make the practice of mindfulness a daily priority. There’s no doubt that social media can quickly and without warning cause emotional dysregulation, creating overwhelming feelings of despair, shame, and anger. Mindfulness is the gateway to a skillful and enjoyable life. It gives us the ability to take hold of our minds and attention. When we do this we develop the capacity to choose what we pay attention to other than feeling at the whim of our emotions, thoughts, and our past. For many, logging on to social media is an automatic behavior. Automatic behaviors include anything you do unconsciously or without thought. For example, driving or carrying on conversations with virtually no attention or connection. You can develop mindfulness by practicing a few of the following exercises: Focus on your senses. Take the time to focus on what you see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. Set time aside each day to be quiet and to experience that quiet. Be mindful of the stillness, noticing comfort in the moments of quiet. Any place you are, pause, observe, and describe 10 details you would not have otherwise noticed.
3. Set limits. Limit setting is not an unkind or nasty thing to do. In fact, limit setting is crucial for finding balance and emotional regulation. Mushy boundaries or having no boundaries at all is stressful and makes one more vulnerable to emotional dysregulation. You can set boundaries virtually by scheduling your social media check-ins to a specific time of day and for limited amounts of time, such as 20-30 minutes only. Or, you can put your phone and screens away an hour before bedtime, using boundary limit phone settings, such as the mute or do not disturb setting on your iPhone and screens.
4. Incorporate time in your day for self-soothing. Self-soothing involves calming you physical body and emotions through various self-soothing techniques that specifically work for you. Examples of self-soothing techniques could be listening to music, spending time with a beloved pet, streaming a movie, drinking tea, or reading. Self-soothing practices help with emotional dysregulation resulting from social media scrolling by bringing one’s attention to the present by focusing on one’s physical surroundings. Keep in mind, everyone self-soothes in different ways.