As a Junior in highschool social media is something that many kids my age rely on. We spend our days scrolling through Tiktok, Snapchat, or Instagram watching people, something i’ve noticed is that social media is causing eating disorders in young girls. We watch people on social media all day who have these perfect bodies and cant help but compare them to our own.

Social media has created a beauty standard that is unrealistic to the regular human body. We base these standards off of celebrities that have had work done on them or who edit their photos with filters and apps.

As teenagers we already start to have a sense of awareness when it comes to comparing our bodies to our peers, but when you have social media weighing in and telling you this how you should look it affects a lot of people mentally. We feel as if we aren’t pretty enough for today’s society because we dont look like the girls on social media. The pressure to be beautiful and fit in creates negative thoughts, anxiety, and bad eating habits so that we can alter our bodies.

Seeing everyone post their amazing lives it makes us want to compare our own. We see how our friends post these amazing things or the people who are famous and how great their life looks. It almost make us second guess our own life, and wonder why doesn’t our life look as perfect as there’s.

We see people posting what they eat and a day in their life and compare what we eat in a day and what we do in our day. It makes us feel that we aren’t good enough and we need to change the way we live so we can be like the people on social media.

Although social media gives us platforms to connect to the world and speak with our voices, it also has some dark sides. It’s important to be reminded that mental health is so important in this generation and we need to protect it while we can. We need to become aware of the beauty standards that we are setting and make them realistic for our young adults.