05/05/2026
Social media and social anxiety.
🤔 On the surface, social media appears to be the perfect solution to social anxiety.
Studies show that in fact social anxiety increases the more social media is used.
Social anxiety is a fear of embarrassing or humiliating oneself in social situations; it prompts people to avoid social situations and become more isolated.
Social media provides plentiful ways and plentiful reasons to avoid interacting with others in person. It means you always have something to do, a way of avoiding eye contact with others, and an excuse not to speak. It’s still generally considered rude to interrupt someone who is obviously on their phone, and the device forms a useful physical barrier between you and others.
This leads to the socially anxious using social media as a coping mechanism rather than addressing the reasons for their anxiety. We have seen many times how coping mechanisms can become unhealthy and damaging.
Not only does social media remove the need to practice social skills (an important factor in overcoming social anxiety), but it also offers greatly increased opportunities to be criticised, invalidated, or rejected, and therefore to feel humiliated or embarrassed.
Rosalind Gill, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at City, University of London says ‘If [young women] posted anything that wasn't positive about their lives, it was seen by friends as “attention seeking”. And it made them so lonely because they couldn't talk about real struggles, they had to keep on pretending to be happy in order to remain popular.’
