Scrolling, Connecting, Comparing – Social Media and Your Mental Health Mental Health Awareness Week 2026

The genuine good news first

Social media gets a fairly rough ride in the press, and some of that is well deserved. But let’s give credit where it’s due. For people who are geographically isolated, physically limited, or navigating something that feels unspeakable in their immediate world, online communities can be a lifeline. The person managing a chronic illness who finds others who truly get it. The man quietly struggling with his mental health who wouldn’t dream of walking into a therapy room but finds himself reading something one evening that makes him feel less alone. The grieving parent who discovers there are others who understand exactly what that kind of loss feels like.

Connection is connection. The nervous system doesn’t much care whether it happens over a kitchen table or a screen – what it responds to is the felt sense of being seen and understood. For many people, social media provides exactly that.

It can also be a route into getting help. Someone might follow a therapist on Instagram for six months before they feel ready to pick up the phone. That’s not a failure of real-world connection; it’s a very human process of building trust at a pace that feels safe.

Let’s be honest. Most of us have had that moment – you pick up your phone to check one thing, and forty minutes later you’re watching a video of someone making miniature food in a tiny kitchen, mildly hypnotised and not entirely sure how you got there.

Social media is woven into the fabric of daily life now, and it isn’t going anywhere. So rather than having a conversation that starts and ends with “it’s bad for you,” I think it’s worth asking a more interesting question: what is actually going on when we use it, and how do we know when it’s working for us versus quietly against us?

This week is Mental Health Awareness Week, and this year’s theme is loneliness – which turns out to be exactly the right lens through which to look at social media. Because depending on how you use it, the same platform can make you feel more connected to the world or more alone in it. Sometimes both, on the same Tuesday afternoon.

Now for the bit that is harder to hear

Here’s where the neuroscience becomes relevant, and it’s genuinely fascinating rather than scary – once you understand what’s happening, you’re in a much better position to do something about it.

Your brain has a reward system that evolved long before smartphones existed. It releases dopamine – a chemical associated with anticipation and craving – when it expects something rewarding. This is useful. It’s why you feel motivated to eat, to connect with people you love, to pursue things that matter to you.

Social media platforms are extraordinarily good at hijacking this system. A notification, a like, a comment – each one triggers a small dopamine release, and your brain learns very quickly to keep checking for the next one. The infinite scroll, the algorithmic feed that keeps serving you content tuned precisely to your interests – these aren’t accidents. They are, as one psychiatrist put it, the same psychological tools you’d use to design a casino. The house always wins, and in this case the house is extremely well funded and has better data on your behaviour than you do.

This doesn’t mean you’re weak or that something is wrong with you if you find it hard to put your phone down. It means you’re human, with a human brain, and you’re up against some very sophisticated engineering. Recognising that is actually a bit of a relief.

Comparison-the specific one that really hurts

There’s a particular feature of social media use that’s worth calling out on its own, because the research on it is consistent and the clinical reality matches it: passive scrolling and comparison are the most reliably harmful ways to use these platforms.

When you’re consuming without engaging – just watching other people’s lives, relationships, bodies, successes and holidays – your brain tends to treat what it sees as an accurate picture of reality. It isn’t, of course. You’re seeing a highlight reel, carefully curated, often filtered, sometimes entirely constructed. But the part of your brain processing those images doesn’t always apply that caveat, and the result can be a nagging, low-level sense of inadequacy that’s hard to name because it doesn’t have an obvious source.

This is particularly acute for younger people, whose sense of self is still forming and who are already working out where they fit in the world. But it would be a mistake to assume adults are immune. I see it in my work regularly – the quiet erosion of confidence that comes not from one dramatic event but from years of subtle comparison.

So what does a healthy relationship with social media actually look like?

I want to resist the urge to give you a tidy list, because I don’t think this is a tidy problem. What I’d suggest instead is getting curious about your own patterns.

Notice how you feel before you pick up your phone, and how you feel after. Are you reaching for it when you’re bored, anxious, or avoiding something uncomfortable? If so, the platform isn’t the real issue – it’s the emotion you’re not quite ready to sit with, and that’s worth paying attention to. The phone is often doing the job that a glass of wine or a biscuit does at other times: offering a quick exit from a feeling. None of those are wrong in moderation; all of them become a problem when they’re the only tool in the box.

There’s reasonable evidence that limiting passive social media use to around thirty minutes a day has measurable benefits for mood and wellbeing – though I suspect the more important variable is intentionality rather than a specific number. Are you using it with some awareness of what you’re doing and why, or are you just… drifting?

The other thing worth saying is this: your brain is, at its core, designed for the real, physical, unpredictable world. Eye contact, shared physical space, unscripted conversation – these activate the social nervous system in ways that a screen genuinely cannot replicate. That’s not a moral judgement on technology; it’s just biology. Getting outside, being around people, having conversations that go somewhere unexpected – these things matter, and they’re worth protecting in your week.

If you’re a parent, this one’s for you too

At Mustard Therapy and Coaching, we work with children from the age of eight, and what we see in younger clients reflects what the research tells us – children and adolescents are navigating social media with brains that are still very much under construction. The parts responsible for weighing up consequences, regulating emotion and resisting impulse won’t finish developing until the mid-twenties. Which means asking a twelve-year-old to self-regulate their screen time is a bit like asking someone to referee their own match – they’re doing their best, but they genuinely need support from the sidelines. If your child has become withdrawn, more emotionally volatile than usual, or seems to be living more vividly online than off, it’s worth taking seriously. That doesn’t mean panic, and it doesn’t mean confiscating phones (which tends to create more problems than it solves). It means opening a conversation, staying curious rather than reactive, and knowing that help is available if you need it.

A thought to take with you

If you’ve been reading this and quietly wondering whether your relationship with your phone is serving you as well as it could, that awareness itself is useful. You don’t need to delete anything or go on a digital detox (unless you want to – they do seem to help some people). You just need to be a little more deliberate.

And if something beneath the scrolling – the comparison, the loneliness, the low-grade anxiety – feels like it deserves more attention than a screen timer can fix, that’s what therapy is for. You don’t have to have hit a wall to benefit from having someone in your corner.

Out therapists work with both men and women who are navigating exactly these kinds of questions – not always about social media specifically, but about the habits, patterns and feelings that sit underneath. If any of this has landed with you, we’d love to hear from you.

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