I feel like we all know already how addictive social media can be for us. You wake up, and the first thing you do is check your phone. Recently I realize I bring my phone in places that… let’s say not the right places and right time to use my phone. The addictive algorithms are getting smarter and harder to fight. At this point, it feels like we have social media usage pandemic or something equivalent.
Digital 2022: July Global Statshot Report, page 9
I did not consider that from so many ideas I could write about, I would choose to write about this particular idea. However, I think nowadays more than ever, we need to take the time and write about things that may not be super interesting, but would make people pay attention to something that may harm them. My idea here is to share my criticism and the disappointment I feel from the internet and its children – social media.
Ideas can develop on their own
The idea of social media, I guess, was to connect people and exchange ideas that would otherwise be difficult to share with different people from around the world. Wait a minute… I‘m not sure if that was the idea with the birth of social media, but I think that was at least one of the optimistic views of a large number of people. However, now we understand that very often ideas develop on their own, as if these ideas have their consciousness and character, and at some point decide to change direction from the original vision. Ideas, like people, can change direction.
They are born and they change, very often in unpredictable ways. Perhaps the vision of social media was well-intended and no one saw what was coming. The idea develops into something harmful, but helpful at the same time, which makes it harder for us to find a way to deal with it.
Manage and control become harder
When I was a teenager (around 12 years ago) social media was not so essential and developed with excellent use of algorithms that know the human psyche and how it works, more than ourselves. Even if we are aware that the algorithms of social media work against our mental health, we are still powerless to take our focus away from it.
We understand that with the time and advancement of technology, the internet and its children, such as Instagram, Tik Tok, and so on. Are becoming increasingly clever and making it difficult for us to exercise some control over our actions or omissions when we use them.
The modern illusion of freedom
Nowadays, many of us would define ourselves as liberal people, who love their freedom and their independence from foreign interventions, ideas, and so on. However, at the same time, we lose much of our time, and perhaps let our freedom, be taken away from social media.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Viktor E. Frankl
We are often less free than we think. Of course, I’m talking about our mental freedom. We lose our most valuable asset in a lifetime’ When we have a lot of free time we often don’t appreciate it and don’t realize how valuable it is. When we don’t have free time, we want more free time to do things we love, and when we find the free time we occasionally waste it on social media, instead of using it for things that are valuable to us.
One way, to reduce the use of social media, is when we realize that we are wasting valuable time that we can’t get back. Life must be consciously lived with different meaningful experiences.
What’s important to you in life? How is it best to use the time you have now to the fullest? How would you choose to use your time, so you don’t have any regrets later for wasting it?
Remember time is the most precious thing we have. As we get older, we become more and more aware of it. Don’t lose it in pointless social media browsing.
Think about how social media affect you
The vast majority of people who use social media don’t realize the harm it has on them. Another group of people is aware of the bad consequences of social media, but not to the extent that they would do something about it. However, a small proportion is aware of their actions, at a level that is like a wake-up call for them to take action towards regulation and control over social media usage.
We need to achieve a reasonable and measured use of social media, which will help reduce the negative effects of using it. The purpose of this post is to awaken a desire in the reader to start reviewing the way he uses social media. We will learn what the potential harms of overusing social media are. I will also try to give clear advice on how to regulate the time you spend and limit the bad effects on our mental health.
How social media make us addicted
Social media surfing triggers The Brain’s Reward System, which causes the brain to release dopamine, the chemical that makes us feel good.
Dopamine is released from the brain when we achieve a goal, and that makes us feel good. This sense of doubling down, once we achieve the goal, is actually what addicts us to social media.
For example, when someone likes something we’ve shared or uploaded, our brain releases dopamine and it makes us feel accomplished and satisfied, which feels nice, and we want to feel it over and over again.
Many people use social media as a coping mechanism to relieve stress, depression, or just loneliness. This can lead to addictive behaviors, which lead us to ignore human relationships and responsibilities in our daily lives. It will make us feel bad and we will start using social media to escape from this bad feeling.
The bad effects on the human brain and our life in general
Depression and anxiety.
As we already know, social media can negatively affect your mood. One of these ways is by putting you in constant comparison with other people.
You go to Instagram and you immediately get pictures of people who are having a better time than you. It makes you feel like your life is far away from the dream life that others have. I guess most people know that what we see on social media is precisely chosen material from moments – photos, not the reality of our lives. However, we still feel that we do not live the life we want and compare it to other people’s highlights. Human nature is such that it makes us compare ourselves to other people and bases our beliefs on this comparison.
We want to feel equal to others as people, whether in lifestyle, money, relationships, or experiences. That’s why in the 21st century, people are perhaps more unhappy than ever, as inequality between people increases. Even if our situation in life is better than 80% of people’s, we will still compare ourselves to the other 20% who have more than us. For example, if you have an income of one million dollars a month, you’re not going to compare yourself with the people who get half a million a month, but with those who get $2 million a month. Thus, our comparison often makes us unhappy. Social media makes this comparison much more accessible and easy.
Cyberbullying
Bullying on social media becomes much easier and accessible, often without consequences, you would have in other circumstances, for the person who harasses you. What percentage of us would have the ‘balls’ to offend Mike Tyson in real life? Most people with common sense don’t even think about it. On the Internet, however, this is common practice, since in most cases your opinion or harassment of others will have no consequences. We do not need to explain how bad it’s for a person to constantly be harassed. The young are even more affected by this kind of behavior on the Internet, as their brains are still developing and have not learned how to protect themselves from negative comments.
Unrealistic expectations
We see the best life can offer us, whether on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. We see what we think we should have.. such is the norm set by society on social media. You see a photo of someone you follow on Instagram, where he posed in a red Ferrari and a beautiful girlfriend emerged from the covers of a magazine. This can make us feel ungrateful for what we have.
Our expectations are increasing, which is sometimes good, but often this leads to ingratitude with what we have at the moment. One of the things that make us happy is the grateful feeling for what we have. Thanks to social media, our expectations of how it is appropriate to live and what to have is dramatically increased and are very often unreal to achieve, at least at the present moment. High expectations often lead to great discontent and constant dissatisfaction with life.
Violates the quality of our sleep.
Social media algorithms are designed to keep us using them, as much as possible. When we go to bed, with the phone in hand, the time we think we’ll use the smartphone, is mostly less than what we spend. This can lead to chronic sleep loss, which in turn disrupts almost everything else in our lives. Not sleeping makes our lives more difficult in everyday life in general. Our cognitive abilities are drastically reduced by chronic undersleeping. It’s hard to be productive on anything during the day if we haven’t had enough sleep. This naturally has a bad effect not only on our mental health but also physical.
Excessive use of social media leads to increased stress.
Most of the negative effects of social media on us are interconnected and lead to stress. The fear that you’re not living your life against the high expectations you set for yourself, because of the overuse of social media leads to the feeling of missing out and it’s stressing you out. Comparing yourself to the unreal highlights of people in the form of photos, and posts, along with the ungratefulness of what you have right now and the high expectations you have, is a good combination of things that would deeply hurt us, plus the chronic sleeping problems, it becomes something that has the potential power to make our lives a rather unpleasant place to live.
Personal advice…
My advice to men using social media:
Recently more than ever Instagram for example has become a place full of eroticism. You see naked women everywhere. This is not good for your brain to be stimulated all the time like that. In the same way, porn could be addictive and damaging for us, Instagram with the erotic they promote is not much different.
Of Course, we see more and more men objectifying women and we see more and more women being okay with being objectified as long as they get something from it. In this example followers.
My advice is to not follow any woman you don’t have something with. Delete all Instagram models that you follow without even knowing them. You should be careful who you follow since that’s what you’re gonna see in your feed. I don’t think it is a good idea to see naked women, you would never meet in person, every time you enter Instagram.
My advice to women using social media:
Don’t compare yourself with all these fake Instagram models. It’s always good to focus on your looks and how people view you, especially as a woman. However, don’t put your value solely on the way you look. As a young woman, it’s very easy to do so.
When you get all the attention from people just because you are beautiful, it’s a very dangerous place to be, because you want to improve as a human being who is judged not only for the way they look but also because of your character and personality, how are you as a human being.
Tips on how to control and live with social media:
- Don’t use your phone in your bed
- Delete some addictive apps.
- Every morning, do something productive like meditation or breath work instead of checking your phone.
- Monitor how long you use social media, try to limit it to half an hour per day.
- Use this time at once, or split it into twice during the day.
- Don’t respond consistently to every message, only at the allotted time to use the smartphone for social media.
- Don’t keep your phone too close to you when you don’t want to use it.
- Replace using the phone with something productive and valuable to you.
New habits are hard to build, easier to maintain
Like every new habit, we need time to adapt to this new behavior and it will be difficult to follow certain rules at first, but then it will become something natural and significantly easier to maintain
Try these recommendations and you will see how your mental health will improve and you will feel much calmer and happier.
The benefits of not using social media very often
They are many benefits, most of which lead to secondary positive effects, as the bad ones lead to other bad consequences.
Some of them are:
–Reduced stress.
–Increased free time and use it for important things for you.
–Improved sleep
–The reduced feeling of anxiety and our overall mental health is improving.
Our mental health overall is improving. It is not uncommon to notice an increase in our self-esteem, because comparison with other people is reduced. This precious time we use for social media, we can use now for other productive things that in turn will make our whole lives more enjoyable and meaningful to live.
Conclusion:
I use social media, I’m not against it, but rather the way I use it. Whether we want it or not, social media is here and it will stay in the future. We must learn to live with it without harming our lives and our health.
There are a lot of positive things that we also use using social media. But the negatives may outweigh the benefits if we can’t learn to control the time spent on social media.
In the future, the topic of controlling and limiting the use of social media will become more important and I hope more prevalent. I’m glad you’re one of those people who will learn to use social media properly.
What do you think about the modern way of living with social media in almost every aspect of our lives? Do you feel addicted or do you manage to control how much of the time you spend on social media?
