Is social media making it worse?

Social media isn't designed to make you happy. It's designed to addict you like cigarettes or gambling. As humans, we have a negativity bias and the social media creators know this. They will show you terrible things because they know you can't look away. I've deliberately curated my social media to only show happy things or science stuff. It can be a fun place, but you really have to put in a surprising amount of work to make it so.

The first thing I want to say to you is that your thoughts are not you, and you are not a bad person. I know you're struggling, and it takes a lot of courage to speak on this. I don't really have a lot of good advice, but if there's any sort of hobby that you have or things that you enjoy, you may want to find forums or groups for those to try to be immersed in positive vibes. But I understand. Social media has gotten a lot worse these days. I genuinely wish you the best, keep fighting!

I totally relate to this. Social media made my mental health so so much worse. I’ve installed an app that disables reels on Instagram and I’m using an account where I just follow accounts of friends I wanna keep in touch with and those of my favourite musicians. It’s helped a lot because I now open Instagram like once or twice a day, and I used to spend hours on there. My advice is to delete all social media or find a way to use it less. You don’t have to keep using it if it’s damaging to you, just because you wanna be “normal”. Like someone else has already said, it’s the negative content that makes more views, it’s just how social media works sadly, and everyone actually would be better off without it. And you’re not a bad person at all. I know all too well what you mean when you say “what if I’m just a degenerate who doesn’t deserve life”, I think that all the time too during my worst moments. But remember, it’s just the OCD talking, it’s not the truth. OCD does this thing where it makes you feel like the worst person in the world, but just because you thought/felt it, doesn’t mean it’s true; our thoughts are NOT facts. Sending you some hugs, I hope you know you’re not alone. 🫶🏻

I'm in the same boat. Social media has genuinely made me terrified that I'm a bad person and I just haven't realised. I think the fact your terrified of being a bad person means your core morals are good. I've been limiting my social media a lot more lately which has helped to some extent. You can get through this, I promise 🫶

I haven’t been on social media in years and the feed on this app was very triggering at first. (Still is somewhat).

For me, Claude and ChatGPT makes it worse