Balancing our Virtual World and Real World: Impact on Mental Health

The emergence of a discourse around mental health in the past couple of years has been paralleled by a similar dialogue about the role virtual spaces occupies in our lives — and how both the themes condense and contract, and come together to generate a factor and consequence. Herein, the virtual world becomes the factor, the oh-so evil entity, while the immediate effect it has on our mental selves becomes the unaware consequence. However, the discussion, as any, needs to be deconstructed and broken down before we can get around to talking about the creation of balance between our real and our virtual selves.

The biggest plus point and probably the greatest appeal of social media — Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, the works — is the space it allows for wish fulfillment and the way this functions to create a system of reinforcements. This fulfillment can range from either wishing to let your friends and family know about something going in your life without it being seen as bragging — something that social media has long provided for. However, it can also move beyond this and become a space for creativity and performance — we could become entirely different selves, with socially relevant interests and hobbies, going to all the places we always saw photos of, eat our hearts out, share our thoughts and find kindred spirits, thus giving the self an escape from lives which may not be as interesting as such, and a break from normal life. This kind of fulfillment is available to almost anybody these days with a phone and internet connection.

Amongst teenagers, social media has become the very nexus of socializing — our memories, our days, most find a way to figure in our virtual spaces whenever they’re the least interesting.

This creation of a virtual space can be felt most keenly by kids born in the late 1990s — most of us saw the very rise, of, say Facebook, and before long, all the rest of the apps that have now become indispensable to our day-to-day existence. This has brought about not only a complete makeover in the way we negotiate our social spaces, but also in the way we understand our places within this network as individuals.

Numerous psychological studies carried out in the 2010s have sought to understand this very effect of the virtual world on the minds of different age groups — and mostly, teenagers. These studies talk about and highlight a variety of consequences that range in degree and seriousness. Their findings can easily be contested on various grounds (small or limited sample size, biased inference) and they might be problematic in some aspects, but there is no disregarding the fact that most of us have felt the negativity associated with our virtual world, either in little to some degree.

Some of these studies highlight issues of major depressive disorder, mood disorders, eating disorders and attentional problems in teenagers and children, while others focus on how social media builds up anxiety, a hatred of the self, and other issues such as FOMO or fear of missing out.

Such an understanding of the virtual space can easily prove to harmful to the mental health of an individual predisposed to such disorders in the first place, and can be especially problematic for teenagers in their formative years.

Solutions to the issue can be many, one involving a complete abandonment of this virtual space. However, most of the time, this cannot be done due to the centrality our society has given to same. The only sensible solution, then, remains to strike a balance, to make sure one doesn’t outweigh the other. Sometimes we lose our foothold in reality and start believing the inferiority complex, the depressive moods, the feeling of not being adequate enough that social media gives us, not realizing how the lives we so carefully curate on social media is only a tale or a thing of fiction at times. Our real world is not one of ease, as our virtual world might make us believe of others, and the hard times that come our way, come mostly in the way of everyone else. It is realizing this that’ll help us view both the worlds from the same window of perspective.

Smriti Verma