Are you out of your mind? You spend most of your daily hours on your phone or computer! This phone is the reason for all problems whatever happens to your surrounding, according to parents. These are some statements, you used to listen daily at your house. Not only youngsters but elders too, are busy with their phones, watching videos and scrolling screens on their Facebook or Instagram or Twitter profile. This causes Social Media Addiction.
Have you asked yourself how much time you spend on phone and computer screen not just for ‘work from home’ but for your habit only? Just like it has become your routine to check posts on Social Media. It’s good if it has a time limit but not for hours spending on screen.
So, what you say, are you a social media addiction study or not. We are going to find out are symptoms, effects, or solutions for this problem.
Table of Contents
What is Social Media Addiction?
Addiction, when you feel compulsive towards something either a drug or some activity that leads to negative effects. The excess use of social media addiction study platforms like Facebook or Instagram or youtube or Twitter leads to addiction to it. You feel restless and try to ignore your personal problems by using social media.
Constantly checking Facebook status, stalking someone’s profile for hours, making videos for hours and checking, how many likes or comments you get for it.
It is very difficult to say when fondness for some activities becomes the necessity and crosses the line and becomes an addiction. You can say that I am just checking the headlines or current news on Twitter, but for how many hours? Five hours or more?
Here you have to find out how many hours you spend on and how much you crave for social media?
Find out, are you a social media addict?
By giving yourself some answers in yes or no for the following simple question, you can analyse the status of addiction:
Do you think a lot, about using or planning for social media addiction study when you are not online?
Do you feel a craving forsocial media addiction study to uses more and more time duration?
Do you used to spend all your daily data and still recharge it just for using social media?
Do you want to use social media addiction study just to ignore your personal problems?
Do you feel uncomfortable and restless while unable to use social media?
Have you ever tried to reduce your time on social media addiction study but failed?
Has more use of social media affected your personal life, work or relations or studies?
If your answer is ‘Yes’ for few questions asked above, then you are a fairly habitual social media addiction study user. This could be controlled by following some easy steps. Like disabling the sound of your message or notification tone. You will have to restrain yourself from checking the phone every other minute. And by following self–imposed no screen time period.
On the other hand, if your answer is ‘Yes’ for most of the questions, then you have developed or are developing an addiction to social media. It is like any other psychological disorder, and this could be confirmed by using the formal procedure by a psychologist.
Social Media addiction’s effects on Human Brain:
It has both physical and psychological effect on human. First, we have to understand what is Dopamine, it is a neurotransmitter, our brain produces it and it is used to send messages to nerve cells. it helps us to feel pleasure and reward for some experience.
According to a study by Harvard University, the brain produces dopamine and feel rewarded once you see comments or likes on your post. Social media gives you countless reasons and visuals for feeling this pleasure. This is same as one could feel while Gambling.
Waiting for likes and comments or retweet any comment, makes us more addicted to social media. Everybody used to talk about themselves less but more on social media. We used to express our life and accomplishments on it. Which makes them to produce more dopamine and feeling of reward and crave for more attention.
The problem will start when our social media life and accomplishment are not the same as our real life. Or we use social media for ignoring real-life stress, depression or problems. When we continuously run social media for relieving above problems than our dependency further increased on it.
On social media, you will get more attention than in real life. Therefore one could start ignoring real life and engage more and more in social media. That leads to problems in personal life, changed behaviour, relationship problems, health issues bot physical and mental, ignorance towards studies and work responsibilities.
Social Media effect on Mental Health:
While social media is good for worldwide information and stay connected with your friends and recognized personalities, at the same time overuse of it makes you more unhappy, depressed and isolated. It affects your mental health negatively.
Others personal life always looks better and more perfect than yours on social media. That makes you unhappy about your achievements in real life. You will feel less when someone share pictures of any grand party, get together or any tour in which you were not invited or you were unable to attend it because of your studies or work. In this case, you will feel left out and isolated.
Consequently, one can feel depressed, jealous or even suicidal as his/her life is not perfect as others on Facebook and Instagram. Social media creates a false environment of more happy, perfect and successful life profiles. This makes an individual compare his/her real-life to those fake lives on the internet, leads to anxiety and depression.
According to a study of California State University, when a person visited any social media site at least 58 times in a week, would feel 3 times more isolated or depressed than those who visited social media less than 9 times a week
Additionally, continuous scrolling on screen makes our mind confused and delays our reflex action. Reflex action that enables human to respond to some action. Since Eyes and Mind could not act in synchronous, this leads to stress, anxiety and lost mind condition.
It causes lower Self-Esteem:
Social Media continuously shows you the perfect pictures and body shapes. One would post filtered photos or their best moment on social media. There are no beauty or body shape standards, we start comparing ourselves to them that causes lower self-esteem and disordered eating in youngsters.
These unrealistic beauty standards ongoing on social media sites conditioned the mindset of youth to follow such trends. Those could not match with it feel isolated and disrespectful towards themselves.
In addition to this, I remind you of the tussle between Tik-Tokers and Youtubers, both have lots of followers and influenced the youth in many ways. They could influence youngsters for fashion trends, dances forms, acting skills or even promoting sexual harassment too.
Hence, Social Media addiction is found in youngsters and young adults and simultaneously, they have to face the online harassment more as compared to adults those are in the ’30s and above.
How to cure this addiction:
There are two types of social media addicted individuals, one could manage to control his/her crave for using social media by reducing the on-screen time, turn off the notification tones and sound of the phone. Therefore they could be successfully recovered.
On the other hand, those are more addicted to social media, need professional and expert help. In this case, one should contact the dedicated treatment expert. They will provide guidelines and medication as in case of other addictions. This is how one can get recover from this addiction and start all over again as a fresh start.