Social Media Addiction. How it is an addiction? How to Avoid it?

 

In early times, the technology and social media era truly blossomed. You see the social media and smartphones; we have limited turn to TV magazines and newspapers into something that follows people everywhere, even in the bathroom. So all day images are flash to us in three-second posts. It generates feelings of need lack and competition the social platform that was originally set up with the best of intentions became quickly the largest most powerful social conditioner of all time and it's pushing everyone to display their ideal life and to watch their ideal peers.

A study by the group Common Sense Media revealed that teens spend an average of nine hours per day consuming media. Pew Research Center shows that 24% of teens go online almost constantly and 35% of them want to become YouTubers which is fine. But most of them don't even know why many studies show that our current social media conception can lead us to depression addiction self-doubt and unhappiness that social media algorithms create echo chambers and reduce our exposure to new IDs. So how can teenagers learn to know who they are develop self-love and feel free or of their own choices? If they're constantly conditioned by these addictive media. My experience taught me something with my post I shape your world with your post, you shake mine and in this hyper-connected world, our digital habits have a long-term impact on ourselves, our society, and our planet. With our post like or share, we are approving a behavior, a choice, or vision with our post like or share. We give more power to the message underneath the post with our post like or share we vote for our future.

So how can we use these amazing creative platforms to benefit the world and avoid the negative impacts that it causes for those of you who are influencers? You can reach hundreds of people in a second, think about the message you're putting out there for those of you who have kids help them. Understand the need they have to post and remind them that social media isn't the real world. It's a tool that can use for the inane or for the beautiful and if you have friends who post selfies, instead of liking the pictures or roll your eyes realize it may not be narcissism but quite the opposite maybe you need to belong and need to be loved and need to connect. Try to read the message underneath the post reach out beyond the screen. So a French philosopher Sahabi said four super technologies we need a super conscience.

Well, I think this is our big next cultural challenge to raise their consciousness and bring humanity to the material and bring more connection mindfulness, and authenticity to our digital world. The good news is we're not passive participants in this hundred billion dollar industry. And now that we know how the game works we can play it for good promotion, what we love, what we value, what matters, and then perhaps when we learn to control social media rather than it controlling us we can create a new world.

 

HOW SOCIAL MEDIA IS AN ADDICTION

Social media is so new, that it’s difficult to compare it to the substances that we usually include when talking about addiction, like alcohol and tobacco. It’s possible that in the future we’ll see health organizations also classifying social media as a type of addiction or disorder. Still, sites like Facebook do have quite a few qualities that make you want to come back to them.

Through constant feeds and giving you push notifications on your phone, social media sites try their best to keep you on their app or website. Google and Facebook further their reach by also being commonly used to sign in to other sites. Social media sites also seem to have a significant impact on how you feel, furthering your connection to them.

According to a recent study, after removing positive posts from the feeds of over 680,000 Facebook users, people made less positive posts and more negative ones. When negative posts were removed from their feeds, the opposite happened, suggesting that emotions can be contagious. If you feel like you’re spending too much time on social media or that it’s taking away from areas of your life, then it might be a good idea to use it less or take a break.

 

Signs that you are addicted to Social media

 

1. You are on your phone every morning and before bed, it's just become a part of your daily habit. Now to scroll as soon as you wake up, you check your notifications; you check how many likes your status got. The other night you wake up in the morning you check that you go to bed and the evening. Constant checking of notifications affecting your sleep patterns, because you're going you're on your phone before and after you were you've slept as well.

2. Two, how many affected your self-esteem likes you receive. How many likes how much social validation do you get from your Facebook. Your social media activities affect you deeply, your social media presence affects your real-world self-esteem is of worth.

3. Mindless scrolling, scrolling for no particular reason, no particular purpose completely unconsciously driven by habit entertainment entertainment and entertainment. It is social validation. So if your comparison etc sector has been unconscious without you being aware of it.

4. Your real-life connections are affected you're around people here and friends around family. Yet you seem to be on your phone scrolling, scrolling, once again checking your statuses. By all that, just your real-life connections affect you because you do not find it as entertaining to talk to people as you do scrolling. That's a problem you're not paying attention to your real-life experience, you're in this digital world right now that is a strong, strong, powerful indicator.

5. You are thinking about what to post during your day. You're going about your book, the cost of your day you're thinking you're experiencing a few things or you're thinking oh I should take photos of that, etc you can word it. In this way, old having likes that will get etc you see so you're actually carefully considering your image, the image that you're going to portray on social media, the performance you're considering that how to do, how best to present yourself to get the most validation.

6. You feel lonely when you're not on social media when you are alone at any place. If you do this then you are developing a social media addiction. I'm not quite sure how to deal with this so you want the validation but when you want to feel connected to social media as we're all humans, of course, it's just natural but social media is not the way to combat this loneliness. Unfortunately, so if you felt that a lot more, that's a sign.

7. Your game board, more easily with your day-to-day routine. So if you put your smartphone down and start paying attention, you actually get bored, you don't feel you feel like you; you need that constant entertainment because of social media. Because the Facebook feed is entertaining, not going to deny that so many cool videos, so many cool memes, photos, pictures, etc status are all a job in a constant source of entertainment so it's natural that you become so plugged into this. So that's a sign, it is a sign that you are becoming slowly but surely addicted.

 

HOW TO AVOID EXCESSIVE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

 

In the last two decades, we’ve seen an explosion of technology. And while there can harness all technologies for good, there’s also a way to misuse any tool. I’m not arguing against the use of social media.

The famous management consultant, Peter Drucker, once said, "Tell me "what you value, and I might believe you, "but show me your calendar and "your bank statement, and I'll show "you what you really value." And it's true.

Most of us, myself included, spending more of our time and attention than we would like to on these apps if we were to look at our lives from a more rational bird's-eye view. Some tips for breaking your social media addiction, whether you actually call it an addiction, or whether you're in denial. I also recognize that social media can bring a lot of benefits, but along with those benefits come drawbacks, Jeffrey Hammerbacher once said, "The best minds of my generation are thinking "about how to make people click ads." And of course, to make you click those ads, those minds also have to think about how to keep you on their platforms for as long as possible. So, at the very least, it meticulously engineered these things to be huge time-sinks, but that isn't the only criticism you can level against them. They also can make you a less happy person.

As repeated research has shown when you're spending a ton of your time scrolling through these feeds of meticulously crafted posts that show the highlights of people's lives, including people that you probably know in real life and you're comparing them, sometimes subconsciously, to your own life, the entire thing, warts and all, you can make comparisons that put a damper on your happiness. How do you use these tools, and treat them as tools, to get their benefits, while avoiding the drawbacks?

Let's start off with something that is very easy to do, kill your notifications. Notifications are like that ringing bell that made Pavlov's dogs salivate, only instead of giving you food, they deliver a quick dopamine rush as a new comment, or DM, or post from someone else. Now, there is nothing wrong with checking these posts or answering your DMs, but when you look at them in response to a notification, you are establishing a habit; you are establishing a craving, and when those notifications come, in the future, you're going to have fewer mental defenses for avoiding them. And the problem here is that these notifications have no respect for your time or the fact that you need long, uninterrupted periods of concentration for your work done. So go into your phone's notification settings for each social media app that you have and destroy those notifications.

Second, I'm going to suggest that you redesign your phone's home screen to remove all social media apps from it, and this is something that I actually did recently. Because on those platforms, and more often than we liked, and found ourselves scrolling through them, wasting our time, so we should just get them entirely off our phone's home screen. Create an entire second page of apps on your phone, and buried all those social media apps inside of folders. It's a very intentional thing.

Now, to suggest another option that would actually negate the need to do all that, what if you only used social media on your computer? The problem with social media apps on your phone, and one of the biggest things we're trying to get away from. Here, is that they can become pervasive throughout your entire life, and that's because your phone is in your pocket, or in your purse, all day long, meaning you have constant, easy access to these tools. But if you were to delete all these apps off of your phone, you'd still be able to use most of them on your computer, in a more deliberate manner.

Now, so far, all we've talked about is the binary choice of using these social media apps at specific times of the day or not using them. But this next tip actually gets into the middle ground, because social media tools and apps are actually collections of many features, take Facebook, for example. Facebook has the news feed, but it also has the messenger tool, and it also has the events tool, and the group's tool and some of those tools might actually be very useful to you, like the messenger, or the groups, while others, like the news feed, maybe completely valueless in your life. So instead of asking yourself, "Should I block it or should I use it?" what if you block certain features.

 So if those goals are a priority for you, then you should ask yourself, "Do I need all the social media accounts "that I currently have?" And you can also get more granular than that, such as asking, "Do I need this app on my phone?"

Keep in mind that your environment influences your ability to maintain self-discipline, so just like somebody who's on a diet and trying to avoid junk food needs to get all the junk food out of their house. You need to get all the access to social media out of your immediate vicinity.