Is Social Media Helping or Harming Your Fitness?
Avoiding social media is nearly impossible. If you have an internet connection, you can access an infinite amount of information and influence. But how does this power affect our health and fitness?
With just a few taps on your screen, you’re exposed to all the fitness advice you could ever need. Some of it is extremely valuable, but some misleading, and some outright harmful. Social media can be a tool for motivation and learning, or it can create confusion, unrealistic expectations, and addiction. Understanding its impact is key to making it work for you, not against you.
The Dopamine Trap
Opening up Instagram or TikTok is like locking yourself in a room and throwing away the key.
It’s a prison for your mind.
These apps are perfectly designed to keep your attention on the app, so the built-in algorithm will feed you with what you want (or don’t want) to see so that you react and keep scrolling.
We consume content, get motivated by watching people that look like us perform impressive fitness feats, but then realise we have to actually do the work ourself. And because doing the work means your hit of dopamine is delayed, you continue scrolling for the next hit.
Motivational fitness content can feel productive, but often leads to inaction.
The Infinite Opinion Problem
Scroll for 30 seconds on social media and you might find someone claiming the best diet is vegan. No, the best diet is carnivore. No, diet doesn’t matter, you need to run 30 miles per day. No, you need to recover. No, exercise and diet is too hard, take these supplements and you won’t need to worry about any of it.
It’s confusing, isn’t it?!
Everyone is fighting for your attention on an app designed to keep your attention solely on the app. So people will say absurd things just to enforce a reaction. If you’re not educated on the subject, this flood of conflicting advice can leave you paralysed, unsure of which path to take so much so that you do nothing.
There’s more than one way to be fit and healthy. But people will assertively make claims that their way is the best because they want you to buy their product or service.
Three Ways to Take Back Control
The easiest solution to this ever-growing problem is to delete all social media. That’s not realistic for most people, though. Instead, take control of how you use it.
1. Curate Your Feed
Follow credible experts, look for evidence-based content, and unfollow accounts that spread misinformation or unrealistic expectations. Every bit of content you consume should be taken with a grain of salt. It isn’t for you, so it doesn’t take into account all of the individual factors that affect your ability to perform.
Even the most qualified and most experienced person can post content that doesn’t help you in any way. Be vigilant.
2. Self-Awareness / Be Purposeful With Your Time
Track your time on social media. You might find that you’re spending (wasting) hours of your most valuable resource - time - on social media. Keep yourself accountable by setting limits on the app, or reviewing your screen time at the end of every week. Seeing this number might be the wake-up call you need.
3. Build Good Habits
Stick to the basics and build slowly. Small actions, when done consistently over time, compound into something great that you will be proud of.
The key here is moderation. I like to live by and coach the philosophy of you can do anything, in moderation.
Moderation is a very broad, open-to-suggestion term, though. We can be more specific than that. No one expects you to be the perfect human being 100% of the time. No one is like that, we’re human, it’s in our nature to mess up. We make mistakes, we sleep in, we stay up late, we play video games, and we do things that we know we shouldn’t. That’s okay.
But if we can build 2-3 good habits that taken closer to our goals, that will compound over time.
Social Media Isn’t The Enemy
Social media doesn’t have to be the enemy that it is sometimes made out to be. In most cases, social media never stops anyone from achieving their goals, it simply amplifies what was already going to happen.
It’s easy for people to share a blanket statement that social media is the worst thing to ever happen to humanity. But it has benefits, we just need to get a little better at using this powerful tool.
Give yourself a break, social media has only been around for the last 15-20 years, that’s just 0.006% of human history. We’re always learning, always evolving.
