Lesson video

Welcome to the RSHE Internet Safety and Harms: Reality versus the Online World.

My name's Mr. Duffy.

And today we're going to look at unhealthy comparison when online.

So, what we see may not reflect reality.

We're going to look at unrealistic and false representations of wealth, success, and friends, understanding our emotions, and strategies to help you not make unhealthy comparisons.

So let's look at some key words then so that we understand what we're talking about.

So social media, we're going to talk a lot about that today.

Because a lot of our influences and a lot of our comparisons are generally now made using this platform.

So social media websites and applications that enable users to create and share content to participate in social networking.

Compare and contrast.

So when we're looking at making unhealthy comparisons, we are comparing and contrasting our lives.

And what that means is to look closely at something in order to show a likeness and differences.

Compare is used for showing the likeness between two or more things.

And that's what we're doing when we're making those comparisons online.

So in this lesson, you will need an exercise book or paper so you can write some things down.

It's quite a few tasks today, so you will definitely need quite a few pieces of paper.

You'll need a pen or a pencil, obviously to write those things down.

So why do we compare ourselves to others then? For some reason, humans do this all the time, we compare ourselves to others all the time.

People of all ages do this.

I do this.

My friends certainly will do this as well.

And we're equally prone to consistently comparing ourselves to others.

So what I'd like you to do now is pause the video and think about this scenario and answer the question.

So Joseph and enjoys following a reality TV star daily on various social media channels.

This reality TV star inspires Joseph because they came out as bisexual, publicly online.

And they showed how supportive all of their friends and family were.

This reality TV star wears designer clothing Joseph would love to be able to afford, and be brave enough to wear.

Why is it unrealistic for Joseph to compare himself to this reality TV/social media star? What I'd like you to do is pause the video and I'll see you in a second.

Fantastic.

So I hope you've got some really good answers there.

So let's take a look then.

So why is it unrealistic for Joseph to compare himself to this reality TV/social media star? Although there are some positives, the fact that he's come out as bisexual and everyone was really positive about it.

There are some concerns.

And the main ones really are that social media only shows one aspect of somebody's life.

And this often tends to be the positive side.

It's very rare that somebody puts the negative things that are happening on social media.

And as a result of that it does not reflect reality or the real world.

It is an edited version of somebody's life.

The other thing to be really careful about is this looking at the clothing that they're wearing, or the cars that they drive or the makeup that they use, these are the things that the social media and TV stars tend to highlight.

And that's because they tend to be gifted these items to wear or advertise or are paid to promote them.

And because they're being seen a lot, they getting the brand out there.

So it's really important to understand that actually, this reality TV star may not have paid for any of the clothing that they're wearing and Joseph is trying to aspire to something that realistically, he's unable to do.

So you have got to be careful when comparing yourself to a reality TV or social media star.

Now the reason for teenagers, so you guys doing this is due to the process of developing distinct personality.

So you're trying to find your way in the world, trying to find your way in your social grouping, your social settings and trying to find your place.

And you will compare yourself to other people a lot.

So what do you compare when online? What I want you to do, pause the video and write some things down, I'll see you in a minute.

Fantastic, hopefully you got some amazing ideas.

These are some of the few that I could think of for myself.

Well, definitely we see nowadays don't we, all the time on social media, how many wealthy people there are? I see it on the TV shows, we see it through social media, newspapers, et cetera.

We're always seeing wealth, aren't we? And that's demonstrated in lots of different ways, the most obvious with the ship, with the big yacht in the harbour there.

But also in discreet ways where people say where they're on holiday.

Maybe they're in an exotic place, somewhere really nice.

Like Dubai maybe, and we see all these shots over on Instagram and Twitter and other social media websites.

Success, people are always showing how successful they are online.

Friends, yeah we compare ourselves with our friends a lot.

What have they got? What haven't they got? What do I want? Social status, where do we fit into our social network of people? Where are we in that little group? Possessions, so the things that we have, our possessions.

Maybe, do we have the latest mobile phone? Do we have the latest games consult? Do we have FIFA 21, have we got that one yet? So it's, and it's all those things isn't it? Our possessions.

Appearance, the way that we look.

We do compare ourselves a lot.

Certainly young men particularly are starting to really compare themselves to images that they see online, of the perfect physique, for example.

It's something that's happening more and more now within society.

And it is perfectly normal.

It's perfectly normal to look at a celebrity, wow, I really would like to look like that.

But got to make sure it's not becoming unhealthy.

And we'll talk about those things as we go through the lesson today.

And personality traits as well.

The way that we do things, our personality.

Really interesting.

So what do you compare yourself to? To who do you compare yourself to? Have a think, pause it and write some ideas down and I'll see you in a minute.

So what did you get then? Friends, definitely.

As I said earlier, we do compare ourselves to our friends.

What do they have? What don't they have? What do I have? What would I like? What's their life like? All those kinds of things we always do.

And we always look to our friends, so or our closest people to us.

And we do tend to look at them and make those comparisons.

Family, family members, maybe our parents, we think, oh, we really want to emulate their successes.

And we compare ourselves to that.

I want to be just as successful as my parents, for example.

Or my aunties and uncles.

We do compare ourselves to our family.

And again, it's all normal.

It's how we approach it.

And the strategies that we have.

Influencers.

Now, we're not going to talk too much about Influencers today.

However, influencers are having a huge impact on how we compa- in who we compare ourselves to.

Influencers might be someone like Cristiano Ronaldo.

They're there to influence our decision making, primarily our buying.

It was developed by marketing companies to get us to buy into a product or service.

What influencers massively? The biggest one I can think of, Cristiano Ronaldo, like I said, the Kardashians is another obvious person.

They're celebrities.

So it makes into that these influencers who, you know, like I said, are trying to influence our decision-making and our buying.

This is also done by celebrities.

What are some things that we may not be aware of is that celebrity may drive a certain car.

That car has actually been leased to them because they know that they're going to be photographed in that car.

And therefore people are going to want to buy that car because they're influencing.

It's those little things we might not necessarily be aware of.

And we might not be aware that they're influencing us.

So it's really important to just, to understand that.

So what mediums influence you the most to compare yourself to others? So mediums could be something like a newspaper, for example.

Pause it and I'll see you in a second.

Fantastic, well done.

So what did you get then? Let's have a look.

So these are some of the things that I can think of, the internet is the most obvious.

Nowadays, we know already that we can be connected to the internet 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The internet has a huge potential to influence us, whether that's negatively or positively.

But the internet definitely definitely is the big one there.

Social media, obviously that's on the internet.

Social media, we're always on social media.

Some of you might be too young to have social media accounts.

Don't forget, the age for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook is 13.

For WhatsApp, it's 16.

To have a YouTube account you need to be 18.

However, you can have parental consent and you can be 13.

But some of you may already have social media accounts.

And it's really important to understand that you are being influenced through your social media.

Whether that's from, like I said, the influencers who are trying to get you to buy and create trends for you to start buying their products and services.

But it might also be through celebrities showing their pictures in hot climates like Dubai or whatever.

And that's really important to understand because that's creating this perfect world and that's what they're portraying.

YouTube, obviously TV and film, a hundred percent.

A lot of these TV programmes now are, the Kardashians, obviously that's just stopped, but that's still massive.

And they were big influencers showing their life off.

And we see a lot of these type of documentaries, Made in Chelsea is another one.

Yeah, we see this perfect life, going out to nice bars, having nice cocktails, and doing all these nice things.

And they are, they do influence us.

Magazines and newspapers.

Maybe not so much nowadays with magazines, obviously picking them off the shelf and going and reading them.

Heat magazine, Now, OK!, those types of magazines definitely influence us.

A lot of this has now drifted onto the online world, onto the internet and definitely social media.

But yeah, we might look through a magazine and read it and go wow, that house looks amazing.

I would love to live somewhere like that.

And books, reading certain books, depending on what you like reading will also influence us in our decision-making.

Maybe even influence us on our personality traits, or even influence our appearance, the way that we want to dress.

Adverts, adverts are targeted.

Especially now with the internet, adverts are targeted to you.

You've created this social person all online, and these algorithms are able to track what you're doing and see what you're doing and things like that.

And they will make adverts personable to you, which could be very handy, could also be a little bit of a pain.

But it's really important to understand that.

The adverts are targeted now very much at you.

And again, influencing your decision making.

And one way that they do this, which is really interesting is they will create trends.

All right, might be a fashion trend.

It might be the TikTok-y type stuff.

That's all influencing you.

Yeah it's all influencing to create the branding then get revenue.

It's really interesting how they do it.

And obviously TikToking can be quite fun, but equally they are influencing you to do those TikToks because they go up online and they create views, which then creates advertising revenue possibilities.

Cause people go, oh, well, I'll advertise that because it's hitting my perfect demographic audience.

So let's meet Zoya then.

You've seen the picture, you've seen this up there with a cappuccino and, or a latte, whatever it may well be.

I'm an Americano drinker, so, no idea what that is, but let's say it's a cappuccino.

She's taking this picture, she's in a coffee shop, she's taking a picture of her cappuccino.

So Zoya is a really happy teenage girl and she's not bothered about her qualifications and behaviour at school.

She's very popular, she's happy.

She's, you know, perfect.

She has this perfect life.

Zoya relaxes in the evening by spending time on social media.

So she'll go to social media, she's old enough, she's over 13 and she'll go on to Twitter, Instagram, and put all these pictures on there that she's been taking throughout the day.

She shares pictures like this one of her in the coffee shop.

And also of a clothing haul.

So she'll go off shopping during the day and she'll buy all these wonderful things, then she'll show off what she'd been buying.

Everything in her life appears perfect.

She wants to be an influencer.

She's seen that you can create, can actually generate quite a good income from it.

And she thinks I'm going to be an influencer.

She's quite good at it, she's got quite a lot of followers over 40,000 followers on Instagram.

So she's doing very well and that's her main focus.

That's what she's going to do.

But let's take a closer look at Zoya.

Cause that's what we see online.

That's what we're seeing online, is this perfect life.

But what we're not seeing is that she finishes school about half three, and then she's in clubs till half four.

She has a paper-round until seven.

Then she then goes to gymnastics training.

She's a very talented gymnast and she'll go to gymnastics between half seven and nine o'clock at night.

And then when she gets home, her parents are really strict and want her to do extremely well.

And it will be she'll do her homework, she'll have a shower, wash her hair and do the normal things that a normal teenager would do.

And then around 10 o'clock, she is then on that social media, which is quite late really.

So what I want you to do today is copy the mind map on a piece of paper and try to add two examples to each section of the mind map.

So we've got this perfect life.

Where, what examples have we got of this perfect life? What examples have we got of her being unhappy? Her behaviour? So that could be the behaviour at school and consequences.

What consequences are there of those? I'm going to give you a couple of minutes to do that.

And then we'll talk about it in a second.

Off you go, just pause it and I'll be with you in a minute.

See you soon.

Fantastic, so let's take a look at this perfect life then.

So if I go, if we look back and think, well what's a perfect life? We've got disposable income, haven't we? Clearly got some disposable income there, from her paper-round, probably.

Yeah, because she's able to buy all these nice clothes and do these nice things.

And that's the other thing that we could say is this perfect life.

She can do these nice things.

She has disposable income.

She can go shopping.

She can go shopping with her friends and buy all the nice clothes that she wants to buy.

So there's two for you.

Unhappy.

We don't see that, do we through her social media accounts? We don't see this unhappiness.

But is she tired? We've got to think about the fact that she has social media after 10 o'clock at night, when she's had an extremely busy day.

And the other thing could be pressure.

She could have an unbelievable amount of pressure on her from her gymnastics coach who's wanting her to do well because she is successful and she's good at gymnastics.

So there could be a bit of pressure from her coach.

It might be even her family.

We've also got the pressures of her homework.

She might not like school and she might display this behaviour of being disruptive maybe.

Just simply not bothered.

So her attitude to learning might not quite be good enough.

But, could that be because she's acting out some of the insecurities maybe? That actually, she's not as happy as we'd like to believe.

Behaviour then, so linking that into the behaviour.

She is displaying poor behaviour at school.

She's displaying poor attitude to learning, so she's not working hard enough in lesson.

She may be wasting lesson times.

She might have been messing around with her friends and generally just being a bit disruptive.

But that could be because she's playing out some of her, the childhood play.

Cause she sounds like quite grown up like.

And actually she might just be reverting back to a bit of immaturity and just basically having a laugh because potentially she's not having a laugh at home in her private life.

So the consequences then of that could be that well, she's not going to do well at school.

Her grades might not be as high as they could be.

Maybe she's not achieving her target grades.

She might not be doing particularly well at school.

Consequences of that could be that the parents put more pressure on her.

You need to do more homework.

You need to do more independent study.

That could be then putting more pressure on her.

It could be that she might not be allowed out.

They could ground her, they could say right well, you're not going out this weekend.

You're going to concentrate on your work and you're going to do this, that and the other.

And that could make her unhappy.

Going shopping could be a bit of a release.

The consequences of that are, that shopping becomes almost like she has to do it, because it makes her feel really good about herself.

And in some respects that could then become dangerous because she might spend more and more money.

May even get to a point where she's spending more money than she has.

And that's why she's maybe got to be a little bit more careful.

So what I'd like you to do is think about this notion that what we see online or in the newspapers, in the media, wherever, wherever we talked about those things earlier, what we see may not reflect reality.

It might not be the true picture.

I think about my own life.

You know, when my children were little, I never put the 2:00 AM feeds on when I'm tired.

I'm literally crying my eyes out because I'm so tired because they won't go to bed.

I put the nice one by the Christmas tree or on holiday.

And we do, we always do this.

Even I do this as an adult.

But, Zoya has developed confidence issues.

Which she has managed to hide from her family and friends by using social media to portray this perfect life.

And it's really interesting this image, if you think back to the other image with the cappuccino slash latte, we can see that actually that could be the reality.

Unhappy, on her own.

There's no friends there.

She could be on her own.

So there could some deep unhappiness behind, sitting behind this social media, amazing life.

So what I would like you to do now is pause it.

And I would like you to write a letter to Zoya giving some advice.

What should she do to make herself feel better? Include in your letter, who you are.

So hello, my name's Mr. Duffy.

Introduce yourself.

Why do you want to help Zoya? Is it something, have you been there? Maybe you've had to reconsider and reflect on your use of social media and maybe you were in a place where you were making unhealthy comparisons.

So you could come from a personal experience.

But also you might be thinking, actually, I really want to help this person because they're clearly unhappy.

What could she do to make herself be, feel better? Let's come up with some strategies.

We'll have a look at those strategies later on, but it'd be really interesting to see what strategies you are already aware of.

Pause it and I'll see you soon.

Fantastic, hopefully you've got a really nice letter written to Zoya there.

And we'll have a look at those strategies soon.

I really, really enjoy this quote here from Steve Furtick.

I think its a really good quote.

Something I found whilst trying to put this presentation together.

And it says, the reasons we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind the scenes with every one else's highlight reel.

And I think that is absolutely perfect.

I think it fits this perfectly well.

We know our behind the scenes, we know our bits that maybe we wouldn't show online.

Our unhappinesses or even just our general, day-to-day life.

But we compare that to what we see, whether it's social media or the internet, or those other sources of mediums. And we constantly compare our normal lives to something that is being portrayed as perfect.

When we see these magazines, particularly celebrities in OK!, where they have all the nice pictures in the bedroom, or the front room, or the kitchen.

And these houses generally are phenomenal but you know, they're absolutely beautiful.

They're massive, and they've got the perfect kitchen, the perfect bedroom.

Everything is placed in perfect places.

Everything is neat and tidy.

We just don't live like that do we? Imagine trying to live in a house that's as perfect as that.

And that's really interesting because we would then look at that and think oh, that's what I want my house to look like, with my bedroom or my front room, or my kitchen to look like, and in reality, it's got pots and pans on the side.

It's got cups of tea lying around.

It's got, that's just normal, that's how we live.

You know, we don't wear perfect clothing sitting on a bed, pausing for a camera.

That's just not something that we do.

But we see these in the magazines and we are influenced by them.

But we all have triggers that can affect our confidence.

And unfortunately, social media provides us with numerous platforms to help, to quickly trigger that unpleasant self-doubt.

Social media is amazing.

We can connect with so many different people and have so many positive experiences.

But it does give us a platform for those self conscious, that doubt, that confidence issues to be triggered.

And it might be our appearance.

We might look at this amazing person and think, wow, they look fantastic, I want to look like that.

And it starts to trigger unpleasant thoughts and self doubt.

And it's really important that we understand those triggers.

It might happen, it might not.

You could go on social media and never have those experiences.

But, we need to be aware that we could have those experiences and then what to do if we do.

So why do we make unhealthy comparisons? Just jot some things down that I've been talking about and that you already are aware of.

And I'll see you in a minute.

Pause it, and I'll see you soon.

Fantastic, so what I was trying to do this presentation, I was trying to find a picture of, in comparison.

I wanted the perfect life versus the not so perfect.

Borderline impossible.

It was so hard and I gave up in the end.

And I actually, I made a very good point is that the picture goes here.

I couldn't find anything.

It's really hard to find that real life picture.

Even when we think about, when we take out the picture of our children, first day back at school, we see them all the time and they're quite heavily thought out.

They're done in a certain place.

You're not going to do it in front of a pile of washing up.

You're just not going to do that.

You're going to select a nice place in the house.

It might be a quite nice wooden door.

Lets put them in front of the front door.

It might be, I've got a nice fireplace.

Let's put them in front of the fireplace.

You're not going to put it in the building site at the back of the house that might be getting done up.

You're just not going to do that.

So it's real important to understand that real life pictures don't really exist.

As I said here, you don't see that 2:00 AM baby feed.

Or the massive pile of missed homework.

We just don't, we don't show that.

And the reality is people are constantly showcasing the best aspects of their life.

Just like Zoya, exactly the same as Zoya, and we all do it.

Reality is what is lost on social media.

We emphasise the best versions of ourself, instead of the real version.

And we do.

We don't show when we're unhappy or when we're sad or when something hasn't gone our way.

Let's say, we didn't get the paper-round or we didn't get that job, or we didn't do so well on a test.

You're not going to put it online.

You know, you'll put when you do really well on a test, you're not necessarily going to put that you only got five out of 50 on an exam, on a mark.

You're going to put when you got 50 out of 50.

And that's just nature, that's what we do.

Life can be hard and actually can be really depressing at times.

And we can have low mood and that is perfectly normal.

One thing to stress is that if you are experiencing low mood more often than not, and it's becoming problematic, you must speak to your parents.

You must, must speak to your parents.

I can't emphasise that enough at this point.

You must speak to your parents.

Or speak to your teachers, but you must speak to someone.

It's really important that you do that.

Because the photos we see constantly, like I said, online are very much with the perfect life, they are.

When we go for a nice walk, let's take a picture.

It is normal.

But for us, when we are viewing it, it's really important that we understand that that is that perfect life and that it's not always like that.

And that we don't need to make those unhealthy comparisons.

You can enjoy it and think, oh, amazing.

That's what a nice time you all are having.

But remember that they're putting the perfect image online or when your friends talking about certain things.

So thinking about some of those emotions then.

What emotions do you feel when online? Pause the video and I'll see you in a second.

Fantastic, so what's really important is to highlight that this is normal.

You're not the only ones that are feeling any of these emotions and it is normal, perfectly normal.

I will certainly feel these depending on what's happening in my personal life, for example.

And these emotions will be played out based on how I'm feeling at the time.

It might be jealousy.

You might be thinking, oh, I'm stuck here.

I'm cold, and wet, and miserable.

I want to be on holiday, where they are.

You're going to feel like that.

You might feel anger.

It depends what the subject topic is.

You might get upset.

You might feel frustrated, sad, happy, excited.

There's so many emotions that we can feel when we're, whether it's through social media, or other mediums as we just discussed earlier.

And it is perfectly normal.

But as I said previously, when can it become problematic? And to make it very simple, when it starts to take hold of you.

Is to come up with some strategies.

So can you think of any strategies to help you not to make those unhealthy comparisons? Pause the video and I'll see you in a second.

Fantastic, so throughout the presentation, I've hopefully given you quite a few strategies that you can put into practise.

One of the things is if you have got social media is just reduce your social media time.

Just reduce it down.

If you're spending, oh, I don't know, four hours a day on it, that's probably too much.

Cut it down to half an hour.

Select a designated time.

Not in bed.

We call it blue light.

We need at least half an hour to an hour off our phones.

Cause it doesn't help us sleep.

All right, so select a time of day.

Maybe it could be an evening.

You've just had your tea.

You're letting it settle before you go off and do whatever it is that you do for the rest of the evening.

Maybe go on there for half an hour then.

But select a time, stick to it.

But reduce, just reduce your social media time.

Redirect your focus on things that really matter.

Does being on social media, the internet, looking at these magazines, is that really that important, or is it your friends? Is it your friends who you see on a regular basis? Is that what's most important to you? Or your family? Speaking with your family, talking to them, asking how their day was and talking to them about your day.

Might be really, really helpful.

Redirect your focus where it really matters.

It might be on your spa.

Go and practise your spa a little bit more or your music or whatever it may well be, your hobbies.

And assess where those negative comparisons are stemming from.

Is there a reason why you're having those emotional thoughts, maybe jealousy? Because ultimately you could make it happen for you.

If you're jealous about maybe, I don't know you thinking, oh, they've won that amazing competition in football.

I want to be that good.

Go out and practise.

Make it happen.

But, we need to assess where those negative thoughts come from.

Why am I getting jealous? Why am I getting unhappy? Is it because of X, Y, and Z? And address those and then redirect your focus maybe into those things.

The other thing, and I'll say it again.

And I said it earlier on, is if you are having unhealthy comparison, if it's overpowering everything that you do, these unhealthy comparisons, please speak to a teacher.

Please speak to your parents.

I cannot stress that enough.

But don't worry about what you see online.

Don't worry about what you see in newspapers and magazines and on the TV, its perfectly normal.

We will have a reaction.

We will have an emotional reaction, whether that's positive or negative.

But what we need to understand is how we control those emotions and how we control those feelings.

And that's really important to know that it happens but this is what I'm going to do about it.

I'm not going to take it to heart.

I'm not going to let it overpower my sense of logic.

It's nice, it's all settled.

It looks pretty, but it's not real life.

I'm happy with myself and I'm happy what I'm doing.

So that's good.

And I'm going to be happy for them.

It's really important that you think about these strategies, reduce that social media time, just put down some of the internet time, and speak to an adult.

Really, really important.

So thank you for joining me for this presentation.

I really, really hope you've enjoyed it.

I really hope you've learned something today about making those unhealthy comparisons and the social media.

I really hope that you've got something from this today.

If you'd like to, please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Twitter, tagging @OakNational and #LearnwithOak.

I've been Mr. Duffy.

I really hope you've enjoyed it today.

Thank you for joining me and I'll see you soon.