How to use social media in a healthy way?

Social media is a whole world in it's own, it has a few positive but many negative sides. But if things are out of hands for you how can it be a good thing? are you facing these common symptoms after using too much "social media" platforms?

• Is social media affecting your focus and productivity throughout the day?
• Are you overwhelmed by the constant notifications and the drama that has been driving you nuts lately?
• Are you spending sleepless nights staring at the screen of your device even though deep down you know you should be asleep because you have a really important presentation tomorrow?

If all these are your symptoms you need to take a serious look into your habit of using internet and how is it affecting your personal life on a day to day basis? The cause and effect; the price your sanity, health and general life is paying and the most important question to ask yourself, is it really worth it?

Social media is NOT the enemy but it’s not exactly a friend either.

We are living in an era where not knowing is equally wrong as knowing too much and not being able to integrate it in your life at all. The trends come and go but deep down there remains this lingering feeling of knowing too much crap without having any actual purpose of it in your life. The problem is we are spending too much time on internet than any other generation has done in the past thousands of years.

We simply don’t know how to handle this powerful tool that everybody has an access to nowadays and can use it to create any kind of content. On top of that they are packing it in the form of short videos.

A monkey is eating a banana and about 8.97 million people are wasting their more important time that they would have spent otherwise on cooking their own meal which in return would have saved their money and even would have added some productivity to their own life. And that’s not all the moment it finished there comes another similar video this time it is with a kitten and a puppy, aww? Long story short you have just wasted away about 2 hours of your time in watching “short videos”.

But wait now, you’re feeling frustrated so you have this desire to vocalize it now you just closed the other app only to open this new app to post a hashtag to express how furious you really are after wasting your 2 hours on “cute animal videos”. And done, wait a second what is that a “pic” of cute panda with a puppy? And there goes another 2 hours.

Although there are cute animals and everything social media is not hurting you deliberately but it’s keeping you hooked for hours and that is actually hurting you in short as well as long run.

Yes this is me... do I need help?

We nobody can tell you anything unless you acknowledge it own your own. In honestly, we all want to watch some cute and funny videos and we all want to stay up to date to the daily affairs of the world. We want to appetite the hard work of content creators; we want to shout out for our buddies. We want to keep up with cutting edge technologies and even with conspiracy theories but at WHAT COST?

If you feel really bad without running an app in the background to keep your attention engaged or you’re missing out on important things that you ought to be doing instead the problem is clear. Now I am not some psychologist, I can only speak from my observation, one to one conversation with few friends who have been consumed by the addiction of internet and such and to this day nowhere to be found but in their basement. Some of them sure need some help and honestly I have been there as well and I thought nah my life is fine, pfft I’m alright. Then one day my computer just died and I didn’t get it fixed and I decided to turn of my phone too for a week because when my computer died I realized there is more to life than sitting on a desk and watching pointless things through a Screen. That’s when I realized yes I needed help indeed.

What should I do? I don’t think my situation is as bad but I sure want to reduce the hours on internet

Like I said before social media is not the enemy and not everybody as an acute addiction to social media but we all can use it in better way. I sure stopped using internet and all social media for a week but after that I had to use my phone because I am not some hermit. The moment I turned my phone on again, there were hundreds of unread messages and notifications from all sorts of applications. I missed calls from, friends and family some were a bit worried others were laughing at me because that was unexpected. This made me wonder even more what if I can still use social media and my devices but I sure didn’t want to get sucked into the same place that I was stuck in a week ago. So here’s what I did.

1.) Get rid of all push notifications

This took the edge off indeed. Notifications with all their beeps and vibrations do induce a certain type of anxiety that in turn makes us want to have at least a peek of what just got flashed on our screens. Make a rule to check all your social media apps only once or twice a day, preferably toward the end of the day.

2.) Delete duplicate social media apps

There exists app that have same feature just with a slight difference. For example, if you like to text your friends you don’t need whole lot of different apps to text them through all the available apps come to an agreement with your friends and even family and use only one app for your online social app. This save you a lot of time and distraction.

3.) Take complete day off of all your social media apps.

I have reduced my social media usage that I go without any social media for weeks and when it comes to some specific social media platforms I barely use them now. Of course, it didn’t happen in a day but it did happen eventually. Make some rules and follow them religiously (with science of course). Decide specific time interval for your apps and only use them when you really are free and can spare some time. Don’t seek apps to vent out or distract yourself when you are bored because that would feed into your old patterns and addiction might take over silently once again.

4.) Find new distractions

• Pick a new hobby, go out on a run, meditate, write down a few thoughts the old way using a pen and actual paper.
• Beside that volunteer in your local community, for your friends, family and even parents, help them out with their work or tidy up your own room, bathroom etc.
• Join a gym, lift some weight.
• Learn to cook your own meal and clean the dishes.
• Read an actual book, or write one?
• Grow new plants or take care of the older ones?

Final thoughts

Hobbies can really add more value to your life in a longer run and will help you grow even happier, stronger and well prepared to take unexpected challenges that we all face at some point in life. Social media is good for entertainment if done properly and with constraints. The life without social media is not as bad either but can be much better. Social media does affect out mood and consume our personal time that can be rather used in much better ways that you will never find on social media apps.