This post may include affiliate links.
To gain a better understand of what our online activities reveal about us, we got in touch with Art Markman, PhD, who is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Bring Your Brain to Work and Smart Change: Five Tools to Create New and Sustainable Habits in Yourself and Others.
"We share personal moments online to create a communal experience that can actually enhance our memory for those events," Markman told Bored Panda.
"By taking the time to record and post these events, we are helping them to stand out from the rest of our daily lives in ways that improve our memory for them and make us feel more connected to our social media community."
So, whether you're 15 or 35, the desire to upload your photo online is understandable. Now, what that photo is is a different story.
There's a paper published in Psychological Reports that presents a scale to measure oversharing.
The researchers gave a questionnaire to teenagers asking how much of their thoughts, emotions, and personal life events they put online. Then, the researchers asked if the teens enjoyed sharing this information and if they thought there was anything "too personal" to disclose online.
Upon cross-referencing the results with the teens' mental health assessments, they found that teens who shared a lot online compared to their peers had higher levels of anxiety and attention-seeking tendencies. These teens also reported higher levels of worry and an excessive attachment to social media, and many had an "intense urge to post."
The oversharing scale that the researchers used was based on a psychological concept from 1973 called social penetration theory (SPT), from Irwin Altman and Dalmas Taylor.
Altman and Taylor thought that "self-disclosure" was critical to how people develop relationships; as time goes on, we disclose more personal information with one another. In SPT, there are two ways to self-disclose: with breadth, the number of topics you share about; and with depth, how deep you go on one topic. Breadth usually comes first, then depth.
Too much or too little sharing can slow down a relationship. We want our level of intimacy with others to be more or less the same—we don't want to share very intimate details when someone does not reciprocate.
But like so many things in life, the internet isn't inherently bad to us—it's how we use it that matters.
"A healthy relationship with social media is one in which it is an addition to your life without being a distraction from it," Markman said. "When you find yourself engaging more with your virtual friends than the actual people in your life, then you will want to scale back.
"In addition, it is natural to compare your life to the ones you see portrayed in your social media feeds. If those comparisons make you feel sad or anxious about your life, then that is another good sign that you should reduce your social media engagement."
Markman said, "The decision of how much to share online is certainly a personal one. But it is useful to imagine yourself six months in the future, looking back on your social media feed."
The professor suggests stepping into the shoes of this slightly idealized version of yourself and asking if you think you would find the amount you are sharing now to be acceptable/valuable or not.
