Social Media Impacts How We See Ourselves

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In today's episode, Social Media Impacts How We See Ourselves, we discuss how Social media can make an ordinary life feel like it is losing a race with no rules, and that sinking feeling is often a predictable brain response, not a personal failing. I break down why the highlight reel hits our nervous systems so hard and share small, practical ways to scroll with more clarity and less shame. 

• the gap between what is real and what is posted 
• how algorithms and curated highlights keep our attention 
• the brain’s social comparison instinct meeting an impossible scale 
• dopamine loops, low attention span, and why stopping feels hard 
• why kids and teens can feel the impact even more 
• body and beauty distortion from filters, FaceTune, and AI 
• the reset scroll and recalibrating what “normal” looks like 
• success and lifestyle distortion and the missing behind-the-scenes work 
• why social media is not a diary and why that matters 
• relationship and belonging distortion and the sting of exclusion 
• a simple pre-post pause to check your motive 

Transcript

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Welcome And The Scroll Spiral

Speaker 0:00

Welcome to Couch Time with Cat, Mental Wellness with a Friendly Voice. I'm Cat, your friendly neighborhood marriage and family therapist, best-selling author, and TEDx speaker. But most of all, I'm a proud wife and mama, endurance athlete, and wholehearted coffee lover, and I'm truly delighted to be your host. Each week we gather for thoughtful conversations about relationships, resilience, healing, and yes, sometimes we laugh along the way. Let's begin. Somewhere right now, someone is standing in their kitchen comparing their actual, cluttered, beautifully unremarkable life to a stranger's highlight reel, quietly deciding if they're falling behind or not. And I say unremarkable because we can think that we can miss the joy and the beauty of our own beautiful, slow, precious lives when we're looking at bigger, better, faster, stronger on social media. And maybe that someone is you. Today we're talking about the gap between what's real and what's posted, why our brains can't always tell the difference and what we can do to come back to ourselves. Stay with me. Let's picture something ordinary. A Tuesday night. Someone's lying in bed, phone six inches from their face, thumb moving on autopilot, the warm glow of blue light shining on their cheeks. They weren't even looking for anything in particular. And in the span of 90 seconds, they've seen a stranger's engagement photos. Oh, she got proposed to, or oh, he got proposed to. A friend's dream vacation to Mexico or somewhere even far exotic. Oh my gosh, like if somebody goes on safari, oh my, then our wheels really start spinning. Maybe they're seeing someone six-pack abs at 11 p.m. I have been guilty of that. All my my algorithm is full of fitness stuff. And I just see bigger, faster, stronger, and I think, oh man, but I'm eating popcorn. And maybe they're seeing a headline design to make their pulse spike. You've seen the headlines. You'll never believe she decided that they're going to break up. Then they put their phone down and feel without quiet, without quite knowing why. A little smaller than they did ten minutes ago. That moment, that quiet deflation, it isn't a personal failing. It's a design outcome. The platforms we scroll were built literally by teams of very smart people whose job it is to keep our attention as long as possible. And the most reliable way to keep attention isn't showing us truth. It's showing us highlights, curated, filtered, algorithmically boosted fragments that our brains evolved for tribes of maybe 150 people. We were never built to contextualize at the scale of millions. Friends, the emotional stake for us is that when we can't tell the difference between someone's edited life and our own unedited one, we don't just feel envious. We feel like we're failing at something everyone else has figured out. And all of a sudden, we become the not cool kids in the cafeteria, and we're looking at the cool kid table, and we feel that ache in our heart and those shortcomings. And if this isn't you, I am so, so very happy for you. I can truly say that I do feel it. And I can say that science shows that young people, young boys and girls, feel it in even an outsized way than adults. And they this ache is happening in our kiddos, in our marriages, and our own sense of who we are when no one is watching. So today we're pulling back the curtain. Not to shame anyone for scrolling. I scroll too. It's not a judgment, it's not a moral, uh, it's definitely not a moral judgment. It's more so that we can understand what is happening in our brains and in our relationships when we do over-scroll and what it takes to build a healthier relationship with the feed.

Why The Feed Feels So Personal

Speaker 5:26

Let's settle into couch time. You're listening to Couch Time with Cat. I'm Cat, and today we're talking about how social media distorts reality and what we can actually do about it. For those just joining me for the first time, welcome, welcome, welcome. I'm Cat. Professionally, I'm a trauma-informed therapist, a marriage and family therapist, and I've spent years helping people untangle stories that they've absorbed about who they should be. I specialize in relationships and trauma. And personally, I'm someone who has more than once deleted an app at midnight in a fit for simplicity and clarity, only to re-download it a few days later. So I promise nothing I say today comes from a high horse kind of place. It comes from let's get a sense of awareness and let's see what we're really dealing with here. What qualifies me to sit with you on this particular topic isn't just the letters after my name. It's that I've watched up close how comparison culture reshapes people's sense of worth in the families I work with, in the friends I see, and honestly in my life as well. I've spent real time studying how our nervous systems respond to constant curated exposure to other people's lives. And I've built practical tools that don't require you to become a monk or somebody who abandons technology forever. Just someone a little more awake and aware while you're using that technology. None of us are above the feed, right? We're not talking from a holier than thou place. But I do want to encourage us to find a saner way to live alongside it.

Comparison Brain And Dopamine Hooks

Speaker 7:27

Let's talk brain for a minute, and I'll keep it human. I won't go so deep into um technical jargon. But for those of you who love technical jargon, you are welcome to send me a DM on Instagram at CouchTime with Cat, and I'll send you fun articles or different theories that I'm speaking from. Our brains have something called a social comparison instinct. It's ancient and it used to service really well. So historically, in a small tribe, sizing yourself up against the people around you helped you figure out your role, your safety, and your status. The problem is that instinct evolved for a world of maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty relationships. Today, an average person, me and you, we can passively compare ourselves to thousands of curated lives without even getting out of bed. The instinct hasn't changed, but the scale has. The scale has exploded. And sometimes I just think I don't have the capacity for this. I'm not meant for this. And I think I started to really settle into that notion during COVID. It was 2020, and I, you know, all our lives changed after COVID. There were the before times, and then there were the after times. And I took in so much media, more than I had ever taken in. And I really do think something happened to my brain during that time, and it affected me in really interesting ways. But one of the things was that I became so much more aware of geopolitics, of um different world events, different news events, different cultures, different waves of advocacy. So my horizons expanded so much. And at first, my reaction was I need to do something about it. I need to comment on everything. I need to input. I need to participate. And it just got, it was a runaway train. It was so big, so fast. And I was quickly, quickly out of my depth. I mean, I remember thinking, I cannot keep up. I do not know what I'm talking about. I am saying the wrong thing. People are yelling on me, yelling at me on social media. Like I was trying my best as a lay person to participate in this huge wave of experience. And I was just drowning. So in the before times, though that would not have been something I would have done. I wouldn't have had access to that much information at one time. And probably you didn't have access to that information either. There's something researchers call the highlight real effect, where we compare our own messy behind the scenes to everyone else's edited trailer. And the math never works out in our favor because it's not actually an honest comparison to begin with. And layer on to that, the dopamine loop, right? So that's a neurotransmitter that helps us feel happy in our brain. So the dopamine loop of likes and notifications, that bing, bing, bing, or those red hearts. The same reward pathway involved in compulsive behaviors. Did you know that? And we start to understand why putting the phone down can feel harder than it should. Friends, there have been times where I'm like, I'm gonna put my phone down. I'm reading and I put it down and I read one paragraph and I think, oh, I need a new lotion. And I pick it right back up. I open my Amazon app and I find the lotion I'm looking for. Part of that is my ADD, and then part of that is my low attention span because of the phone and because of my choices around the phone. Of course, I'm not blaming the phone. And then part of it is an addiction. You know, I have had a phone in my hand pretty much since, let's see, I'm 43. I really started having a cell phone probably around 18. So, you know, 25 years I have had access to a phone, but really it's been in the last 10 years that it's ramped up, right? Before it was just a flip phone. And now, you know, we have maps and banks and meditation apps, and everything's on a phone. So it kind of feels like it needs to be on your person at all times. The soul part of this, in the part I really want us to hold on to, is none of this means we're weak or addicted in a shameful way or bad at willpower. I don't want us to shame ourselves. It means we're a normal human brain interacting with a system that was engineered by people to override the state, the same instincts that once kept us alive. So the goal isn't perfect discipline here. The goal is awareness because once we can see the mechanism, we get some of our power back. I don't know if y'all have seen some of the social media documentaries about people who create social media. Friends, it is so illuminating when they say things like, Oh, I don't let my kids use phones, or no, no, no, I don't let my kids use social media. The creators don't allow their children to use it. Why do you think that is? We have kiddos, 11 and 9, two girls, and we don't have a hard and fast rule in terms of my husband and I haven't talked about when are we going to give them social media? We have uh shot over the bow that they don't get phones until they're 18. So I really hope we can stick to that. And if you can't have a phone, you can't have social media. That's how I see it. So I am holding out naively, delusionally, insanely, you know, I am just gonna, I am gonna stay on this, you know, I'm gonna die on this hill until I can't anymore. But we want to prolong that as long as humanly possible because as soon as we give our children cell phones and social media, their lives change. There's the before times and the aftertimes. And I know there are so many safe cell phones out there in terms of you know, social media, that's slightly different. That's not what I'm talking about. But a cell phone with internet access and social media, I think it's like giving your children the keys to an 18-wheeler and saying, go for it. They can reach the pedals and they can operate it, but there's so many unknowns. There are so many unknowns. And take it from me. Um, I've I used to work at a high school with kiddos doing crisis therapy. And um those kiddos, they taught me that they go around every possible parental control. The the the kiddos taught me basically from the inside how they were overriding the parental controls. And I thought, wow. And I remember asking one of them one time, what advice, what what age would you say I should give my kid a cell phone? And at this age, this was so many years ago, so the kids were really young, and they said, Don't, don't do it. It's just too risky. And I thought, wow, for a 16-year-old to be sharing that with me, and I was working in the counseling center there, for a 16-year-old to straight up tell me, don't give your kid a cell phone. I thought, wow, okay, something must be, you know, really impactful here. You're listening to Catch Time with Cat. I'm Cat, and today we're talking about how social media distorts reality. Let's get specific because social media distorts reality can sound abstract until we name exactly where it shows up.

Body Image Distortion And Reset Scroll

Speaker 17:02

Let's start with body and beauty distortion. Filters and face tune and AI touch-ups. Oh my goodness. They have rewritten what we believe a regular, an ordinary, a common face and body should look like. The unsettling part is just that filtered images are everywhere. So many of us have scrolled past so many of them that our internal calibration for normal has shifted. So we think it's common for people to be, for females to have an hourglass figure, for guys to be super buff, or for cheekbones to look a certain way, or for eyelashes to be super duper long, or whatever it is that we're seeing, or for skin to be smooth like glass and without pore. We think that this is the common thing because this is what we're seeing on our phones. But friends, it just isn't. The people who are on social media promoting all that, this is their job. This is their livelihood, this is where they spend their time and energy. And if that's what you want to do, that's totally fine. That's not a bad thing. But I just want you to know that this is this person's main career focus. And if you are a teacher, your main career focus is teaching kiddos. It's not having glass skin. So just what's the word I'm looking for? Objectively speaking, if the influencer is focusing their time and energy on their skin, they're gonna have better skin. And if you're focusing your time and energy on teaching kiddos, then you're gonna be better at that. So part of it is just remembering and realizing, oh, this is their job. This is where they invest their time and energy. People report feeling surprised and even distressed by their own unfiltered reflection, not because they've changed, but because the baseline has moved. I remember I'm not much for um, I get some job, I get Botox in my jaw because I have TMJ. I talk about this a lot on my social media. So you can follow me on at Catch Time with Cat. You can also follow me on my personal social media, which is Gathi Arnandas Hollem. Okay, ready? It's a long one. C-A-T-I-A-H-E-R-N-A-N-D-E-Z-H-O-L-M. So Gati Hernandas Hollam, you can find me there. And so I talk about I get Botox in my jaw for my TMJ, but I don't do anything else in terms of facial work. But many, many moons ago I used to get false eyelashes and I thought they were so pretty. And I I just don't have the patience for it, quite frankly. So, but I do think that they're very pretty. And when I took them off, I felt like I looked like a bald chihuahua, you know, those like little hairless dogs. I my baseline of what I look like had moved so much after looking at these like long, kind of Bambi eyelashes. And then when I took them off, I thought, oh, this is not, this is not okay. This is not acceptable. And the reason I don't get the eyelashes anymore, truly, is because that huge shift in the perception of what I look like was so violent. I thought, I don't want to do that to myself again. I'd rather just be Chihuahua all the time than be Bambi and then Chihuahua. Um, but it just, you know, the more we enhance ourselves, the more it distorts our baseline. So a practical tool here is called the reset scroll. Once a week, you can spend a few minutes intentionally following or viewing content that shows unfiltered ordinary human bodies and faces, not as a chore, but as a re-incalibration exercise for your eyes and your nervous system. Or just go outside, go to the grocery store, go look at a regular person, not a person who's necessarily trying to promote a product or get you to buy a course on skincare or what have you. What you consistently look at becomes your definition of common. So you get to choose that definition on purpose instead of by accident. Okay,

Success Pressure And The Highlight Reel

Speaker 22:02

let's go. Should we go to the next little pocket of information? The success and lifestyle distortion. Oh my goodness. This one hits especially hard for our careers, our finances, our sense of quote unquote, I am behind. Social feeds show finish lines, the launch, the promotion, the house. Almost never the 18 months of doubt or debt or failed attempts that came before. When we only see other people's finish lines next to our own middle of the race mess, of course it feels like we're losing a race that nobody has the actual rules to. And I want to kind of not give the benefit of the doubt, but I want to share something that I think is really important also. It's that social media is not a diary. So a lot of times we judge people for only posting the good things. Okay. I know you've done it. I know you have. You think, well, she's going through a divorce. She's not posting that. She's only posting, you know, that she took her kids to the park. And our sometimes our instinct is to judge someone for that. But listen if you think about it, when you're hurting or when things are complicated, it's most likely that you're turning to your trusted few. I know that when I'm hurting and things are complicated, I go to my mom, my dad, my husband, my best friend. I am not calling an acquaintance and telling her about it because she's not my inner circle. And that's not a judgment on the acquaintance. That's just, listen, when things are hard, I don't have extra energy to be sharing these things. I kind of think of social media the same. Social media is like you have your closest people, you have your first tier people, second tier, third tier, right? We have these ripple effects of, we have these like ripples of community. Social media to me is the furthest out. It's fun, we can connect, we can share moments, but it's definitely not a place I go to share my tender experiences. That's what I write books for. That's what I write blogs for. That's what I call my best friend for. So if you're looking for a very connected experience, you're gonna go to people that you trust. You're not gonna put it on social media. And that doesn't mean you're lying. It doesn't mean you're faking it. It just means that that's not the platform for it. So when we only see people's highlight reels, I also want to encourage us not to judge them because they're only sharing the good things. It's not a platform for hard, messy, or nuanced things. That's my that's my opinion, anyway. Here's a reframe I love giving. Don't compare your behind the scenes to someone else's highlight reel. That's not a fair fight. It's just not a fair comparison. And even then, I don't want you to compare anyway. So anytime you catch that familiar tightness in your chest, you're scrolling past someone's big news or silently naming it highlight real, not the whole story, you start judging. I want you to just take a breath. And it sounds really simple, but remind yourself that this is not the platform for nuanced. And your people are out there. And if you want to share some of your nuance, call them. And if you want to share some of your happy, do that also.

Belonging Fears And Feeling Left Out

Speaker 26:18

Okay, next big pocket: the relationship and belonging distortion. This is kind of a quieter one. The sense that everyone else has more friends, more fun, and more belonging than we do. Oh, I can feel the ache right now in my heart. Seeing a group photo you weren't in can trigger something ancient and painful, the fear of social exclusion, for which most of human history meant real physical danger. So your brain isn't overreacting when it stings, it's responding exactly as it's designed to. The distortion is in the scale and frequency, and we're now exposed to potential exclusion evidence, so to speak, right? We see, we find what we're looking for, and we're exposed to this several times a day, which no one's nervous system was meant to metabolize. Guys, you know I love telling you the real, real. So I have unfollowed people um in my life, like real people that I know. I unfollow them because sometimes I get my feelings hurt if they don't invite me somewhere. And these are not close people. That's you know, second and third tier people in terms of my connection with them. Um, and I know that sounds so wack-adoo. You're probably like, girl, you have got to check in on somebody. But I'm not a saint and I get my feelings hurt and I get overly sensitive, and I get I I feel left out sometimes too. And sometimes, you know, my my not cool 12-year-old self is um making decisions for my follow, unfollow on social media. So maybe you've experienced something like that also. Actually, if you have, will you DM me so that I don't feel alone in it? You can DM me at Couch Time with Cat or at Gathiatanus Hollem on Instagram. So let's pause here for a moment. And I want you to think honestly and not judgmentally about the last time you closed an app feeling worse than when you opened it. What was the story your mind told you in that moment? Was it I'm behind, I'm not enough, everyone else has something I don't. Just notice it. You don't have to fix it right now. Awareness is the whole exercise. So take a breath. Exhale. And when you're ready, let's get back to it.

What A Smiling Post Can Hide

Speaker 29:12

You're listening to Catch Time with Cat. I'm Cat, and today we're talking about how social media distorts reality, the body, the success, and the belonging stories, it quietly rewrites. I want to tell you a little story. A while back, I posted a photo that looked, you know, by every outward measure, wonderful. And there was beautiful light, it was a good angle, it was a fun caption. And what the photo didn't show was that the day before, I had had, we had had, we were on family vacation and we had had a really, really serious and scary event where I had to call 911. This was just a few weeks ago. So while I did post some of what had happened in the caption, you know, I was trying to be authentic. There's no way I could capture all that emotion so quickly. And here's the uncomfortable truth. I didn't post it to lie. I posted it because I wanted to share in real time some joy, even though something really scary had happened. So I was fumbling through it. I wrote what had happened that was very scary, but the pictures were smiling. So then if people didn't read the caption, they just said, Oh, love it, great vacation. And it was just, I was fumbling through. And I think we can do that also. I was looking for a little bit of support, but also sharing the joy. And it was my birthday. And sometimes life is like that. We're holding several emotions at once and it can get messy. Like I said, social media isn't a place to go and I think share the most tender parts of yourself. And while, you know, I don't have a straight up answer, maybe it was a mistake to post some of those hard things alongside with the smiling photo. I'm not exactly sure. But I'm here to say that sometimes we're holding joy and grief or frustration and happiness or surprise and excitement and also anger at the same time. And so even though you may not want to post about that, or maybe some people are just posting about the joy, or some people are just posting about the anger, sometimes we have to remember that we don't know everything that's going on in someone's life, and not because they don't want to share it or they're trying to lie about it, but because they're fumbling through also. Here's what I'd love for you to try this week. Before you post anything, pause and ask yourself Am I sharing because it's true? Am I sharing because it's partly true in terms of like you're holding maybe two separate emotions at once? Or am I posting because I want people to believe this is who I am? And you don't have to change your post. I just kind of want you to get an idea of where you're coming from inside of you. If this episode is resonating with you, screenshot this moment and send it to a friend who needs the reminder or send me a message on Instagram at CouchTime with Cat on the one line that landed for you. I read every single message and they genuinely shape what we talk about next. You're listening to Couch Time with Cat. I'm Cat, and today we're we've been talking about how social media distorts reality. Okay, let's land this plane, friends.

Key Takeaways And Staying Connected

Speaker 32:41

We're gonna bring it all together. Our brains carry an ancient comparison instinct that was never built for a scale of thousands of curated strangers a day. That mismatch shows up in three big places: how we see our bodies, how we measure our success, and how we judge our belonging. And in every case, the fix isn't willpower or shame. It's awareness, small resets, and a willingness to be a little more honestly seen, even when polished feels safer. Here's a line I want you to leave with, and maybe even one you'll want to write down. Don't compare your behind the scenes to everyone else's highlight reel. Your life is good too. Our feeds aren't going anywhere, but our relationship to it can change. We can shape it and we can be more aware of it. Thank you for spending this half hour with me. Wherever you're listening from, folding laundry or driving or having coffee, blessedly a hot cup of coffee. I hope you leave this time with me feeling a little more aware and feeling a little more connected. If today's conversation stayed with you, come find me and tell me about it. Send me your takeaway, send me a picture of you listening to it, and I promise I will read and respond. If you know someone who's been quietly comparing their whole life to a stranger's highlight reel, this is your nudge to send them this episode. Friends, every time you listen to this episode or to Couchtime with Cat, you help make my dreams come true. And I appreciate you so very much. Until next time, take good care of yourself. Thank you for spending this time with me today. If this episode resonated, I'd love to stay connected with you. You can follow along on Instagram and Facebook at Couchtime with Cat and sign up for my newsletter at CouchTimewithcat.com for reflections and resources delivered straight to you. Listen to Couchtime with Cat on KWVH 94.3 and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, and iHeartRadio. Your support means so much to me. Thank you. Until next time, take good care of yourself.