The lighting must be just right. The tilt of the phone has to be perfect. Too high and you look like a shrimp, too low and the entire world can see your double chin. You raise one eyebrow, throw up your most appealing half smile, switch to a kissy face, widen your eyes, and snap…the selfie is done.
You sit there and look at it for a moment, adjusting the filter and examining your expression until you realize you absolutely hate it. And unless you try again for round two, chances are you’ll settle with making the ugliest face possible and send it to only your closest friends.
The amount of time and effort that went into this process is beyond excessive, but if you haven’t been the one contemplating the expression on your own face, you at least know a good amount of people who have. Every other Instagram account is scattered with a few selfies, each coated in a carefully chosen filter and a caption that makes a failing attempt to say “I don’t take myself so seriously.” This strange phenomenon has become more than just facial snapshots, it’s everywhere. There’s a song about it playing on the radio, a website purely devoted to taking them at funerals and even Obama has been known to snap a few.
We’re all a little too entertained by the selfie movement, but who’s to say it’s necessarily a bad thing? According to psychiatrist Dr. David Veal, it is.
“Two out of three of all patients come to see me with body dysmorphic disorder since the rise of camera phones have a compulsion to repeatedly take and post selfies on social media sites.”
For you readers out there with limited psychology knowledge, Oxford Dictionary defines body dysmorphic disorder as a mental illness in which a “person becomes obsessed with imaginary defects in their appearance.” Selfies inspiring such a disease (and the disease itself) sounds a little ridiculous, but for 19-year-old Danny Bowman, the addiction was real. He spent up to 10 hours a day taking 200 snaps of himself on his iPhone. Also diagnosed with OCD, Bowman was hospitalized after he attempted to end his life by overdosing on drugs. He lost 30 pounds, dropped out of school and stayed inside taking snapshots for six months.
The perfect ugly selfie, the perfect attractive selfie and the millions in between are most likely the culprit for our increasingly self-obsessed mannerisms. Especially in the female department, we spend way too much time overanalyzing every single tagged Facebook picture. I’m going to be honest and admit that I’ve overheard friends of mine compare their arm sizes to other people in photos, and people are more likely to untag a questionable picture if they think they look fat, rather than because there’s a alcohol in the background.
All of these observations have been discussed time and time again. We’re all aware of what these applications do to us, yet we continue to use them.
It’s time to put this incessantly talked about problem into perspective.
Is this the first time people have chosen to continue doing something that might not be good for them? Absolutely not. Eating too much, too little, watching too much TV, drinking too much alcohol and smoking cigarettes are only a few examples of substances we’ve consistently abused. It’s only because social media is a recent phenomenon that people feel the need to take it so seriously.
As my mom, your mom, and every single other adult would say: everything in moderation. Hand someone with OCD tendencies an iPhone and there’s a good possibility it will eventually become a source of unhealthy behavior. In no way am I dismissing the seriousness of attempted suicide, but social media is not to blame. Perhaps it has provided another outlet for BDD, but its risk still lies in the hands of the person with access to these popular applications.
We’ve eventually come to this conclusion with multiple leisure activities that people will abuse them. Even excessive exercising is bad for your body and your mind. It’s time we spread awareness that this new, attractive power we have with mobile applications can become addictive rather than quickly dismiss it as something we just shouldn’t have.
Next time you find yourself overanalyzing a photo, take a step back and think about the unnecessary pressure you put on yourself, because the person other people see has nowhere near as many flaws as you’ve found. They’re probably too busy studying their own selfies anyway.
