Learning to ‘like’ yourself.

Last month The Psychologist published an article: Reporting on your ‘dream self’. The article discusses how we construct an image by sharing activity data and dream reports. The article provides an interesting portion on how we ‘construct our best selves’ and I feel this is an important conversation in today’s ‘online’ world. 

Do you reach for your phone first thing in the morning? Last thing at night? When you find yourself laughing out loud, spending time with friends or taking in a nice view is your first thought I should share this?  If so you might find this interesting. 

Over the past few weeks I have shared a number of articles on self esteem, including defining self esteem as the internal measure of actual and imaginal assessments from others . Research shows us that the need to boost our self worth is often a strong motivator for our behaviours and we can strive to increase our confidence by putting our ‘best self image’ out into the world. This can create a tension between the ‘real’ you and the part of you that wants to be liked. 

So how has social media impacted on our self esteem? If you think about how many apps on your phone  track your day to day tasks: your steps, what you eat and your diary. This tracking is designed to help you improve these aspects of your life, to become more efficient. Alongside tracking your own goals, social media allows us to track our progress alongside that of others. Research suggests that sharing this information online is also a way of constructing your own image. We choose to track the information that shows us in our best light, in order to receive the admiration of others. Furthermore social media tells us how admired we are in a quantifiable way, we see the number of ‘likes’ a status receives and this gives us an indication of our ‘worth’.  This becomes a problem when social media is the only way we get confidence and worth from others.

Research suggests that individuals with low self esteem ‘track’ their self worth through posting online multiple times a day, everyday. Interestingly, while in the short term an individual may receive the attention they are looking for, in the long run it appears that this over sharing has a long standing negative impact on an individuals self esteem. Epstein et al (2015) reported that as an individual over shares their posts can be seen as ‘boring’ or ‘attention seeking’ resulting in friends ignoring and unfollowing an individual online. In real life this can result in a disconnection. As a result of this, the individual who shares online may then find themselves lacking in validation both online and in real life and as a result their low self esteem is maintained.

 Help with low self esteem: 
The ‘low self esteem’ series of posts will continue over the next few weeks with information and support on how to increase low self esteem. If you are concerned about your low self esteem you could begin reading through the posts, talking about your self esteem with family and friends. If it is something you feel motivated to address you can reach out to a local therapist through the counselling directory, or if you are unsure of where to find support you can speak with your GP. If you are in need of immediate support you can call Samaritans on 116123
                      

References:

Epstein, D.A., Jacobson, B.H., Bales, E. et al. (2015). From ‘nobody cares’ to ‘way to go!’: A design framework for social sharing in personal informatics. Paper presented at the ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.