Home dysmorphic disorder is the latest 21st-century ill

Kirsty Mcluckie on internalising interiors envy

It is a well known phenomenon that, for some, social media is a recipe for envy, disappointment and dissatisfaction.

As we scroll through posts and pictures detailing our friends’ tropical holidays, beautifully turned out children and even picture perfect meals, contentment with your lot in life can certainly ebb away.

Apparently this also applies, depressingly, to our homes.

Researchers who polled 1,500 British adults using social media for inspiration with their homes found that, while there are more people using Instagram for interiors inspiration than ever before, 70 per cent of Scottish users feel dissatisfied with their homes after looking at images of other people’s houses on social media.

Those aged 25 to 34 are apparently dissatisfied most frequently but whether that is more to do with the age demographic of Instagram users or the difficulties the young have in affording decent housing is not clear.

The findings describe people having an unrealistic idea of what their home should look like, spending time worrying about flaws which would be unnoticeable to others, while feeling pressure to maintain a certain appearance in their home and being self-conscious of it in front of visitors.

This mindset has been described by psychologist Dr David Lewis as home dysmorphic disorder.

He explains: “Our home is our shop window to the world, an outward and visible display of the way we want others to see and judge us.

“This is challenged when we are exposed to the choices of others.

“The more comparisons we are able to make with the ways others present themselves to the world, the greater the dissatisfaction we may feel with our own surroundings.

“The more individuals worry about what friends, neighbours, and colleagues think of them – and this is more likely to be a concern for younger than older people – the greater their dissatisfaction. It is an increasingly common mindset.”

He says that the problem is changing one small item in a room which then leads to an overwhelming desire to make major changes.

In this it is perhaps most akin to cosmetic surgery, which might start out as an understandable desire to fix a flaw that always bothered you, but ends up years and thousands of pounds later with an expressionless face and amorphous masses breaking free all over your body.

In property terms, it may lead to garishly coloured stone cladding or the addition of stone lions on the exterior of a modern house.

My feeling is that if social media is leaving you dissatisfied with your own life or home in comparison with other people’s, you have three choices.

You can either resign your membership of such platforms, change your friends to people considerably less well-favoured or take the altruistic decision to improve everyone else’s life by posting the home decorating disasters you are most ashamed of.

The internet might feel kinder if we all showed off our avocado bathroom suites, peeling ceilings and mouldy worktops.

For as Jane Austen’s Mr Bennet says in Pride and Prejudice: “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn.”