5 reasons why social media is bad for mental health
Social media has connected all of us globally and in real-time. These platforms want you to stay on them all the time. Their success is in you not leaving their platform. And while they are becoming more and more successful in doing this, we are becoming a victim.
Scroll and Scroll and Scroll — there is an infinite scroll feature with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc and it has wasted a million years altogether of people using it. Most of us have not just reached a point where we are just scrolling for no good reason, but we realize that we don’t even like most of the things we are seeing and cannot stop ourselves even then. It is such a sad story. We all used to have hobbies that we went to when we had time in hand. Not any more. Now, we have only one main hobby and that is — to scroll. Why is this bad? You are doing something without a need, you are doing something that you won’t remember. You are very often found doing it without knowing that you are doing it. You are losing time and focus. Neither are we being productive in achieving our goals nor are we relaxing. Please stop the scroll without any need.
Notifications — the worst thing that I have seen in the last few years is when I am talking to people, and suddenly there is a notification on their phone and now while they show that they are listening, they immediately want to check what the notification is for. Even worse is that sometimes this notification is from an app that they don’t even use enough but they just want to remove that notification immediately. Unless you are doing something life-saving which requires you to keep an eye on the phone and respond immediately, you don’t ever need to check and respond immediately. You may not be particular about keeping your wardrobe, your drawers, your laptop bag, your desk clean but you are inclined to keeping your notifications clean. I don’t understand. You can always choose to sleep and keep your phone silent/vibrate and respond to them when you get up. Similarly, you can do the same when you are working or reading, or walking. Why is this bad? Based on several studies, the human attention span has already decreased a lot. This is decreasing it further. You were working on something and that work had your uninterrupted attention until this notification came. Now you have to bring that attention back. And it’s not easy. This is one of the reasons the Pomodoro technique is considered good and effective. Please stop reacting to every notification. You know what is important and what is not. Please behave maturely.
Instant Gratification — Why on earth do you need to immediately know how many likes, comments, reactions you have got on your social media post? We don’t just want to know that we are getting popular on social media but we want to know it every few minutes or sometimes seconds. You wrote something nice, you uploaded a nice picture, you uploaded a good story, good! Sit back and relax. I have 10 very close friends and only they liked the post of my promotion. And my friend had 100 acquaintances and his/her post got 80 likes because it was hilarious. Why is there a competition? It is only social media that is winning all the competition here. I get used to people responding to me immediately after seeing my message. So the day my boss, my friend, my spouse responded to me a few hours/minutes later than they saw the post, I already suspect something fishy in our relationship. Why is this a problem? Not everything you do will be liked by the whole world and neither does it matter. If you are not doing a great job at something, it is not disheartening to see fewer reactions on social media. If you are doing good, the more reactions start making me feel that I can never do bad. It takes years to make an impact and we are now expecting everything almost instantly. Sorry, you need to grow up.
The first and the last thing — the first thing you reach out to in the morning is your mobile and the last thing before you go to sleep is mobile too. What does this actually say about you? You wanna know what is the most important thing right when you wake up, i.e. a new message, an email, some likes and comments, a response. Just before you go to sleep, you wanna spend time watching something and responding to all the messages you saw on your phone. So you had a good drink with your friends, family, and then had some good conversations and went to sleep. Assuming there was a message or an email during this time that you did not see, how would it change your life if you saw it in the morning? Well, nothing would have changed. If it was as important as critical, someone would have called you up. Same thing when you get up in the morning. The worst part is that someone is defining your day by that one message that you first saw in the morning. What if you saw it after you had breakfast? No problems whatsoever. Why is this bad? Simply because you are now glued to your phone and cannot stay away from it. Your day, your life is not defined by your hopes, your dreams, your plans but by every message that comes on your phone. Please learn to lead a life outside your phone.
Short videos — I don’t know how to put it but these short videos are the biggest waste of human resources’ time. I would love to pull the data from all these social media on the total seconds/minutes of videos streamed every day. You didn’t want to see these videos before. And now you cannot live without watching one. Why is this bad? It is of no benefit to you, you are used to watching without your own will at times, it leaves you with little time for yourself and your loved ones, and your attention span is getting further shorter with these short videos. Take a pledge to not see them at all.
I am not ranting about what I dislike about any particular generation. I feel I am also a victim of the above. And, if we don’t come out of it soon, we will regret it a lot later in our life.
In several recent studies, teenage and young adult users who spend the most time on Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms were shown to have a substantially higher rate of reported depression than those who spent less time.
Go out, meet new people, hug your friends and family, play board games with them, sit in the park, by the pool, walk, run, swim, play, read a book, take a vacation, follow your passion, enjoy your hobby, but please avoid using social media so much. Our next generation is watching us. Beware. Act wisely.
