Everyone’s heard people say something along the lines of, “social media is one of the root causes of anxiety in younger generations,” but there’s no common saying about why. Why? I think it’s because the topic of social media and anxiety has become so widespread that it’s supposed to be obvious. OK, this blog isn’t about all of the reasons why social media can cause anxiety, it’s about how my anxiety with social media brought me to find an app called Hey Mayo.
As a 21-year old with moderate anxiety, I can testify that social media has heightened my anxieties. According to Huffpost’s “Social Media is Causing Anxiety, Study Finds” by Britney Fitzgerald, the CEO of Anxiety UK, Nicky Lidbetter stated that “If you are predisposed to anxiety it seems that the pressures from technology act as a tipping point, making people feel more insecure and more overwhelmed.” A lot of people my age have anxiety, which means the pressure from social media is sure to have some kind of anxiety-heightening effect. I have Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Handshake, TikTok, Facebook, and more. All of these require that you create a profile for each app/website. Without realizing it, there you are comparing your profile to others and what photos they post and what they’re doing in their lives. Anyways, after a while of comparing yourself and trying to maintain a certain, yet possibly unreal image of yourself, anxiety can take its course.
Even I noticed that as I was on my LinkedIn profile the other day. I don’t have as many connections as my friends and I felt like I didn’t know enough people. I didn’t realize that I had worked myself up about how many LinkedIn connections I had, until I found myself biting my nails.
The problem is, I compare myself to other people’s profiles. Sometimes, I just want to talk to people without knowing how many followers they have so that I am not sitting there in the conversation wondering if I’m cool enough to be talking to them. And then I came across the Hey Mayo app.
It’s an app that lets you ask or receive instantaneous and momentary help from someone else nearby without having to set up a profile. You download it, write a question and send it, and anyone else with the app who is in the same cafe as you, or in the same space as you will see it and can respond. The app is designed to be a medium for people to ask for immediate help for a short amount of time, like borrowing a phone charger when you’re studying. I really like it because there’s no profile to compare myself to and you get to meet cool people! Obviously it’s good to be cautious as you are meeting strangers, but the messages you send or receive are probably to people you can see if you just lift up your head.
Social media consists of Instagram and Snapchat and all of those apps I mentioned earlier. But it also consists of apps like Hey Mayo, a social app that creates these spontaneous moments of connection with someone else. There’s no profile to compare yourself to and instead, it’s an app that requires you to put your phone down and have a face-to-face interaction. It brings a new level of meaning of ‘social’ in social media.