Why Social Media is Ruining Your Life

As the curated imagery of social media has become more and more prominent, the space devoted to real-life issues and collective empathy around life’s challenges, both extraordinary and universal, has diminished.

Stop making presumptions about other people’s finances

Post-birth is such a fragile, precious time. If anything, people need to be rallying around you and trying to build you up, not putting posts on social media making you feel bad about not losing baby weight.

Tellingly, many of the adverse effects of social media use appear to be inherently gendered. Women make up the majority of audiences across all the visual platforms, notably Instagram and Pinterest,

Now I’m back working for myself again, life isn’t straightforward; I feel a huge amount of angst about money, which a secure salary would mitigate.

I’ve found it incredibly hard to be open about any of these feelings, both the downs and the anxieties, even on my own platforms, simply because there is a huge amount of guilt that goes alongside it. How dare I feel overwhelmed, teary or have panic attacks when there are so many women who would do anything to have a baby growing inside them? I als

Psychologists now refer to two types of attention: spotlight and floodlight. When we are focused on a single task, we use our spotlight brain to centre all of our efforts on its completion. But when we split our concentration between several tasks, we employ a floodlight approach, where we work on more than one thing at a time.

It might look like you’re busy and important as you flip between devices, but the reality is that you’re not. You’re inattentive, less productive, and driving yourself round the bend trying to split your focus in too many directions.

It’s a space where, day to day, you could imagine that all reasonable people agree with you, or at least understand where you’re coming from.

Anna Whitehouse, the journalist behind the @mother_pukka Instagram account and the Flex Appeal campaign – which aims to eradicate maternity discrimination in the workforce and encourage flexible working for both mothers and fathers