Social Media In BPD

We all know the damages of social media on young adult’s mental health and body image. However, there are certain traits those with Borderline Personality Disorder have that are specific to their social media habits. Ever since I started developing BPD, my following count on instagram has never been over 100 people. Even people that I know, and that I see every day, I don’t follow on instagram. Snapchat is the same. If I haven’t talked to someone in weeks or months, unfriended. I like to keep my circle close, which is what I always thought. However, it turns out that with BPD, you actually mirror real life relationships on social media. That is a habit I have developed over the years, because in that time I realized that social media does not ever matter when it comes to the relationship between you and another person. 

Social media is very toxic for BPDers, but not in the way that you want to be the beautiful, skinny girl that has a lot of money and friends. It is toxic in the way that we fear abandonment, and are in need of constant reassurance, so the likes and comments and views are what matter to us. We just want people to like us, we become chameleons to society. All we ever want is to fit in, and be normal, because we know we aren’t. The feedback we receive online gives us temporary alleviation from feelings of emptiness and insecurity. This leads to an addiction of the virtual world we constantly live in today, the consistent flow of buzzes and notifications triggers our impulsive behaviour of obsessive screen time all because we seek instant gratification. It’s like a small dose of dopamine and all we do is fiend for it. We crave being in the other world because it’s where we feel the most normal. When we want to escape, when we want to forget the real world we live in, we go into our safe space that gives us the ability to avoid our problems and responsibilities. Sometimes, that world hurts us, with jealousy or detrimental self comparison to someone else, but that is a small price we pay for being in a virtual reality.