In today’s fast paced society, adolescents are facing severe depression and anxiety. It is also seen that they have a lower sense of self-esteem. The mental of students especially after the pandemic has been effected to a critical level and adolescents are too involved in technology and are having no time to be involved in interpersonal relationships. If they are asked about how much time they spend on spirituality or sports or other interpersonal tasks, it would hardly be more than few minutes. Adolescents who are surrounded by negative thoughts resulting from digitization and internet will not have a higher spiritual wellbeing. Hawi and Samaha (2017) have reported that “people with low self-esteem tend to use more social websites to enhance their self-image and self-esteem”. Studies suggest that 27% of children exhibit symptoms of poor health if they spend three or four hours in one day on internet.
Studies have reported that when adolescents use excess of social media, they have feelings of depression, anxiety, suicide ideations, loneliness, FOMO, and also feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem. Teens have also reported being bullied on social media. Braghieri et al. (2022) has recently reported that students have academic impairments when being on social media and Facebook and have issues in mental health, along with feelings of unfavourable social comparisons. One of the first studies on the issue of internet and mental health stated the results that online activities are related to the reduction of communication between family members, and increased symptoms of depression. According to the observation, which was named “internet paradox”, internet as a social technology decreases social involvement of users as well as their psychological well-being.
So how can we help teenagers? One simple suggestion is to make them mindful. Mindfulness can help in building resilience in adolescents and hence can help them overcome issues of low self-esteem caused by social media. A key mechanism of action of mindfulness is to create ‘mental breathing space’ in order to enable the adolescents to remain unattached to the external phenomena. In this way the adolescents can also start to observe their thoughts and feeling (Shonin et al. 2016). The social media and FOMO will start to be felt as a passing phenomenon, something they can handle. Mindfulness allows a person to become keen observer of one’s own self and gradually transforms the way the mind operates. This greater awareness and perceptual distance from thoughts, feelings and sensory processes helps in regulating a greater capacity to understand emotions during the developmentally stressful period of adolescence.
Mindfulness based interventions need to be part of adolescent life. Mindfulness breathing can also be helpful in reducing stress. Mindfulness is positively associated with psychological health and it is the need of the hour for students to be trained in mindfulness so that it may bring about positive psychological effects such as increased subjective well-being, reduced psychological symptoms and improved behaviour. Also students have lot of academic pressure and seeing other students doing well in this competitive world can trigger increased pressure especially when the success is visible or posted on social media. Students have suicidal ideations when they see the academic success of others. Mindfulness Skills Training has been promoted in higher education institutions. The training for these techniques last for 8 weeks and it brings an overall improvement in performance and wellbeing. Meditation training can also be fostered and this has been associated with increased activity in the prefrontal cortex which is a region of the brain associated with positive emotions. In the field of higher education, studies have reported that mindfulness practices have been shown to help students both with their mental health.
TAKE A WALK IN NATURE. SPEND TIME AND FEEL THE FRESH AIR. THAT IS HOW A SHIFT WILL COME IN YOUR MINDSET. DONT LET THE WORLD OF COMPARISON BRING YOU DOWN. LET THE NATURE UPLIFT YOU!
