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By Melissa Fleur Afshar
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The impact of distressing content on the youngest adults—Generation Z—is often discussed due to their coming of age with constant exposure to warzones, injustice and suffering through smartphones before even getting out of bed in the morning.
But psychological experts are now making a case for what happens when the opposite—people's wins, highlights and peaks—are shared online; an increasingly common phenomenon, and one that occurs simultaneously alongside darker content, leaving those born between 1997 and 2012 to navigate a pendulum swing of curated social media content exposing extreme highs and lows at a frequency previous generations never experienced.
Several recent investigations have linked poorer mental health outcomes to this increased sense of social comparison among Gen Z, which is largely down to the rise of constant connectiveness through social media sites. Platforms like TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram have given way to the normalization of keeping up with people you barely know, seeing their personal and professional wins, and, of course, feeling an increased proximity to celebrities, athletes, influencers and the otherwise super wealthy.
Read More on Life
The Success Olympics and Its Impact on Gen Z
This matters because 60 percent of surveyed Gen Zers in 2024 were found to spend four-plus hours daily on social media, with 22 percent spending seven-plus. Aside from what they see online, which is largely driving the rise in social comparison, real-world changes are also making this cohort feel inadequate.
Luxury brands like Chanel and Dior have entered the middle-class market, with products now being bought and flexed online by "normies" despite once being owned by a select few. Daily, offline leisure activities, once mundane parts of life, have now been branded "status symbols," just as Gen Z report increased work stress and difficulty disconnecting from smartphones. To many in this generation, it looks like everyone besides them is swimming in riches, living life to the fullest, which experts worry will continue to pave the way for mental health declines.
"Gen Z's exposure to success reinforces the impact of social comparison, a phenomenon which is rooted in exposure to others' success, and which drives changes in self-appraisal," Dr. Ashwini Nadkarni, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, told Newsweek.
Prudence Leung, a psychotherapist and expert at EduBirdie, agreed, telling Newsweek: "They live in a reality where the distinction between a classmate and, for instance, Hailey Bieber, both appearing in the same feed, doesn't feel significant. That explains why one in three Gen Zers say the image of a perfect life online makes them extremely stressed."
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She added: "Expectations are also changing. According to an EduBirdie survey, 38 percent of Gen Z want to earn more than $100,000 by 30. That's not surprising when you look at what they see every day—self-made entrepreneurs who look like they became rich and successful fast. Social media doesn't show the average. Trends like 'Great Lock-In' make self-improvement feel fun and easy within a fixed timeframe, and many now feel pressure to optimize every second of their life. This creates a feeling of not being good enough."
New Studies Find Alarming Mental Health Scores
The data bears the theory out. A 2025 poll by Blue Shield's BlueSky initiative and Children Now found 94 percent of surveyed Gen Zers report mental health challenges monthly. Deloitte's 2025 look at Gen Z mental health found 40 percent feel stressed or anxious "most of the time." Gallup data from the same year shows "excellent" mental health among Gen Z has fallen 14 points since 2019, while a collaboration with Walton Family Foundation found just 45 percent say they are "thriving," a generational low.
Harvard's Global Flourishing Study found Gen Z report the lowest well-being of any generation, while a 2020 large-scale study published in the International Journal of Adolescence and Youth linked social media use to depression, anxiety and distress.
Three years later, Cybersmile Foundation's Comparison Culture report found that 89 percent of surveyed Gen Zers compare themselves to others online, 59 percent daily, with 93 percent feeling pressure to compare on areas including bodies and lifestyles, and 96 percent feeling emotionally impacted afterward.
"What I see in my work is people measuring their accomplishments, bodies, relationships against everyone else's highlight reel, without realizing they're comparing their behind-the-scenes to someone's best moments," trauma therapist Jennifer Lancaster told Newsweek. "Most people don't share their failures, so, it becomes easy to believe everyone else has it figured out and you're behind.
"What that does to the nervous system over time is significant. Chronic comparison activates a low-grade threat response—the system is always scanning, measuring, never in the present moment. But regulation isn't just about calming down—it's about flexibility, knowing when to downregulate and upregulate, and having the capacity to move between states rather than getting stuck in one.
"The approaches I find most effective work beneath the cognitive level. Somatic practices build present-moment awareness in the body rather than just the mind. Other practices like EMDR address the deeper beliefs driving the comparison—the ones that formed before social media. People can access a layer of perspective where the metrics they've been measuring themselves against stop feeling urgent."
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Marc Vargas and Emma Lee-Sang
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