6 Ways To Avoid Losing Yourself In The Age Of Selfies

1. Don’t try to have Kylie Jenner’s Lips.

Or Jen Selter’s butt or Gigi Hadid’s abs. If following these accounts make you feel a little less attractive, maybe it’s time to unfollow them. Public figures tend to have a team of professionals behind their flawless looks, besides the fact that they have more time on their hands to just look good. They kind of get paid to look good. So comparing yourself to them is not only detrimental to your overall well-being, it is also not realistic because they didn’t wake up like this!

2. Don’t believe everything you see.

There is so much more that happens behind the scenes that we don’t see, we only see that everyone’s life looks perfect, and everyone’s relationship is the best. On social media, the picture is definitely not worth a thousand words because we are only seeing a snapshot of the reality people want us to see or believe. So before you compare make sure that what you are seeing is the real deal, not a made-up picture for a made-up life.

3. Don’t use it as an excuse to be an asshole.

It’s a good platform to express our opinions but not a platform to deliberately offend other people and their beliefs, or mock their posts or their life. Engaging in heated fights and debates over different political or religious views is not going to fix anything. Making someone else feel “dumb” on social media doesn’t make us any “smarter.”

4. If you must stalk, do it in moderation. 

Don’t take it too far. Don’t stalk your crush’s posts from 365 weeks ago, or stalk their high school exes. It’s normal to stalk someone you like, but find the balance between your curiosity and your obsessiveness. If you keep obsessing about their likes, their exes, their last seen and the accounts they follow, you will always find more than reason to doubt yourself and doubt them, which takes away the beauty of getting to know someone and enjoying their company.

5. Don’t let social media be the scale you measure your self-worth on.

Your followers don’t reflect how popular you are, and your likes don’t represent how attractive or intelligent you are. A lot of people fall into the trap of getting immediate gratification from their number of likes or followers on social media but most of the time, the people following & liking actually know so little about that person. Flip that scale over and don’t use it as a tool to determine your self-wroth or use it as a tool for validation.

6. Disconnect.

As often as you can, it is so easy to get distracted by social media and spend more than half of our day on it. I once deactivated all my social media accounts for a week, it was one of the most refreshing, productive, and revitalizing weeks of my life. We get sucked in the world of social media that we forget there is a life out there waiting to be lived, and people to get to know, and other more substantial ways to feel good about ourselves. If you want to feel better about yourself, give social media a break and try living a life you like rather than liking the false lives of others.