Managing Overthinking in the Age of Social Media

JAKARTA — Social media frequently acts as a double-edged sword for adolescent mental health, as it facilitates widespread self-comparison behaviour. This phenomenon often traps individuals in overthinking or excessive rumination on matters.

Lady Noor Chita, a mental health advocate and CEO and Co-Founder of Santosha, stated that the desire to compare oneself is natural human behaviour, but can become poisonous if not managed with full consciousness. “It’s actually normal to compare because that’s human behaviour. But what becomes wrong is when we focus too much on other people compared to ourselves,” Chita said during a dialogue with the Coordinating Ministry for Community Empowerment at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Indonesia on Friday, 27 February 2026.

However, what is presented on social media is merely a small curated excerpt of reality. Continuous exposure to content imperceptibly places extra workload on the brain. When scrolling social media for hours, the brain subconsciously processes every piece of content exposed to it, even if the duration is less than one minute. The brain recognises things deemed interesting and causes us to linger longer on certain content, which often triggers feelings of dissatisfaction with ourselves.

These breaks are not merely cessation from screen viewing, but function as a transition period to restore consciousness from the virtual world back to actual life reality. “Give yourself time to process that everything on social media is just that—what’s on social media alone. It’s not necessarily true, and not necessarily happiness either. We all need to return to our current condition, to our conscious condition, our reality,” Chita said.

According to Chita, this moment of returning to reality is crucial for evaluating personal happiness without others’ standards. “When we compare ourselves to others, we return to ourselves and our own reality, will we be happy doing that? Because some people are happy achieving many things, whilst others are not,” she added.