How often do you find yourself in a social media spiral? Scrolling endlessly but feeling more alone and disconnected from your friends than before you opened the app?
According to the latest Medibank Loneliness Population Index, it’s a common experience for Australians, with social media being the biggest trigger of loneliness in young people aged 16 to 24.
A massive 41 per cent of young people surveyed said that seeing other people’s lives displayed online was a trigger for their own feelings of loneliness.
For Indian-Australian youth mental health advocate Varsha Yajman, 22, this feeling certainly rings true.
“It’s easy to see what other people are posting – and we all know it’s just a highlight reel – but I think it just one of those things where you’re like, ‘look at them, hanging out with their friends and I’m not doing that’,” Varsha tells Women’s Agenda.
Varsha says that on the days she spends hours doom scrolling on her phone, she tends to feel much more anxious and lonelier.
“If I had just gone out to see my friends in real life, I probably would have still had some anxiety, but it wouldn’t have been this perpetuating cycle of then waking up the next morning and feeling really awful that I didn’t do anything,” she explains.
For 28-year-old Haley Eagle, social media is a tool she uses to stay in touch with her friends and family, many of whom live in the United States where she grew up.
Currently based in Sydney, Haley says it’s very helpful in many ways, but it has its downsides – feeling lonely after a stint on Instagram is one of them.
“I live on the other side of the world from a lot of my friends and family, so social media helps me to keep up to date with what’s going on in their lives, so that when we talk again it’s not like they have to fill me in on the past six months,” Haley shares.
But, if she starts to notice that it’s making her feel lonely, she’ll often opt to deactivate her Instagram account for months at a time.
“It’s quite an unnatural concept to have all this information about what all of these people are doing at all times,” Haley says.
“Comparison is definitely the thief of joy, and [social media] facilitates a lot of conscious and subconscious comparisons.”
Social media: a subjective experience
Taking just one view on social media’s impact on loneliness is limiting, human connection scientist Dr Ali Walker explains. It’s often a subjective experience and lots of nuance is needed in any conversation surrounding it.
Often, social media is just a reflection of how you’re already feeling, and Dr Walker says it might be helpful to consider the sense of connection you get from it as a “malnourished” one.
“If you’re starving and you eat fast food or processed food, it’s better than no food but it’s still not going to be as nourishing as wholesome, nutritious food,” she explains.
“In the same way, if you’re starving for human connection and wholesome relationships, social media is going to be better for you than just sitting at home and not feeling a sense of connection.
“But it’s not going to be as good as having a really meaningful social experience of relatedness.”
A recent international study suggests that people who use social media for the motive of maintaining their relationships feel lonelier than those who spend the same amount of time on social media for other reasons.
For Varsha Yajman, social media can often make relationships feel one-sided, especially if it’s the primary way she is trying to stay connected to others.
“You can have these massive, long conversations online and sometimes it just feels very one-sided. I think it’s easy to feel like you’re investing more into a relationship because you can’t read the tone of a message,” she says.
Dr Walker says that often social media just reflects to us what we are already feeling.
“Generally, if you’re feeling profoundly lonely, you’re probably going to feel profoundly lonely on social media too, because all it will reveal for you is the fact that everyone else is outliving their lives and you’re not,” she says.
“If you are feeling vulnerable, social media is not a place to recover a feeling of strength. And for children, if you’re feeling socially awkward or shy or disconnected, social media is not the place to establish those connections.”
How can we use social media to make us feel more connected?
According to the Medibank Loneliness Population Index, 65 per cent of young people aged 16-24 spend more than two hours a day browsing social media. With that, it’s worth thinking about how we can use this time to help us feel connected to others.
Haley says she often uses social media to facilitate her friendships. For example, if she sees that a friend has posted they are down at Bondi beach, she might reply and ask if she can go and meet them.
“Also, I bought a concert ticket to a show by myself last week, and I just put on my story that I bought the ticket, and I was going to go by myself, but then people responded, and we’re like, ‘oh, we’re going too, come with us’,” she said.
For Varsha, social media has also helped her to maintain new and long-distance connections.
“It’s been interesting to see all the relationships that I’ve been able to make and foster because of social media. If someone’s interstate, it has made life a lot easier, and I’m grateful for that.”
Using technology to facilitate real time conversations can also be a way to combat loneliness. Dr Walker encourages the use of video chats to call friends and family.
“From research, we know that the most meaningful connection comes from being able to see and hear people in real time,” she says. “It doesn’t have to necessarily be in real life, but in real time .”
To find out more about social media impacts our loneliness, tune into the latest episode of the We Are Lonely podcast with Dr Alli Walker, Loneliness in the TikTok generation. Listen wherever you get your podcasts:
🎧 We Are Lonely | Podcast on Spotify
🎧 We Are Lonely | Podcast on (apple.com)
About the research
Research commissioned by FiftyFive5 on behalf of Medibank. Research was conducted in July 2024, among a sample of (n=4,131) Australians.
If you need to speak to someone now, you can reach Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636 or call Lifeline on 13 11 14.