Hester Hockin-Boyers (PhD student in Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences & Department of Sociology), Dr. Stacey Pope (Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences) and Dr. Kimberly Jamie from our Department of Sociology discuss the impact of social media on women's mental health.
Social media plays a big role in modern life. One recent survey found that the average UK adult spends 102 minutes daily on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. However, in academic and popular discourse, social media use is understood to have negative consequences for body image and self-esteem, particularly among women and young people.
Body image research in this area has explored the impact of thinspiration (images that promote the thin ideal) and fitspiration (images that promote the fit ideal) content on women's wellbeing and has found links between viewing these images and greater body dissatisfaction and negative mood. As a result, women are often encouraged to limit their 'exposure' to social media in order to protect their mental health. However, little work has considered the agency individuals possess to curate their social media feed through everyday acts (such as following/unfollowing/muting).
In our recently published research, we examined how a group who are perceived as particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of social media (female weightlifters in recovery from eating disorders) navigate digital environments. Based on a host of intensive interviews, we found that most women reported to regularly observe thin ideal and pro-eating disorder content online when suffering from an eating disorder, as well as fitspiration imagery when recovering through weightlifting. However, contrary to previous research which views women as 'vulnerable' to this kind of social media messaging, our study found that women develop experience-informed strategies to sift through harmful online content and create healthy digital environments.
'Digital Pruning'
The women interviewed spoke about taking personal responsibility for the content they follow and the messages they absorb. We coined the term 'digital pruning' to capture this process of unfollowing unhelpful or triggering content in the interests of wellbeing. Importantly, this is a long-term process which requires diligence and consistent upkeep.
To fully illustrate this metaphor- in order to cultivate a beautiful and healthy garden, one must regularly 'weed out' what does not serve this overall project. In the words of one participant in our study,
"Instagram is your personal magazine, and you curate your own magazine. And I try and do that with it. So I try and make sure that it's, like, a healthy place for me to be, instead of somewhere where there's like loads of people calorie counting and being like, "this is what's in my food" or "this is my 4 hour workout".
The language of digital pruning is also regularly observable within wellness spaces on social media, as users encourage their followers to 'delete accounts that don't nourish you'. In this way, digital pruning is framed as an act of self-care, and is advocated for alongside other strategies reported to improve wellbeing such as regular exercise and time in nature.
