Is your New Year’s resolution to be ‘that girl’? If you’ve been watching too many TikToks like me you’ve probably seen the viral wellness trend that’s taken over. That girl wakes up at 6am, goes for a walk, meditates, drinks lemon water, does yoga, reads, studies, meal preps, tidies her room… does that sound overwhelming? Watching it can be even more so.

There is an innate pressure to constantly better ourselves and make new resolutions, whether we can actually keep them or not. Social media has always shown us a skewed version of reality and it can be hard to watch everyone showcasing their healthy new habits and diets. People have used their downtime to improve themselves or just survive, neither is wrong, but going into 2022, self care and wellness has continued to be a huge trend. Although we’ve become savvy to ‘Insta vs Reality’, the emergence of TikTok gives us another platform to acquaint ourselves with.

The huge TikTok trend of being ‘that girl’, encourages people to be the best versions of themselves, but no one talks about the immense pressure it can add. TikTok users casually squeeze a days worth of activities into a less than a minute long video, like it’s no big deal. Some people make it look effortless when we know that it’s actually quite hard to live this lifestyle. Although these TikToks look aesthetically pleasing and can be relaxing to watch, they are most often inaccurate and romanticized. It’s hard to be that girl! Some days you just want to lie on the couch in your pyjamas all day, but it can feel so embarrassing when you open your TikTok fyp and see so many users, running, doing yoga, eating a salad and drinking 3 litres of water a day. It can be exhausting to watch and instead of being motivating it can often just leave you feeling deflated.

With each new social media platform, we have to relearn how to have a healthy relationship with it. TikTok is an addictive platform, I could sit and scroll for hours and not realise how much I’m absorbing. Like Instagram you can take a lot of positives from TikTok, outfit inspo, healthy recipes and a good laugh, but don’t take everything you see as gospel. Just like Instagram it’s easy to conjure up a false sense of reality. It’s not possible to achieve all that you see on TikTok, you can’t expect to have all the same outfits, the same healthy lifestyle or be the funniest person ever and get thousands of views. Take what you see with a pinch of salt and just enjoy using the platform.