Is Social Media Killing You?

In today’s world it is very rare to find a teenager or any age for that matter who does not have a social media account.According to Mediakix, the average person spends forty minutes on YouTube, thirty five minutes on Facebook,twenty five minutes on Snapchat , fifteen minutes on Instagram and one minute on Twitter. While this may be true for most people ,others tend to spend a much larger amount of their time on their social media accounts.

For those who spend heavy amounts of their time on social media ,identify to having a social media addiction.Addictive social media use will look much like other addictions and can cause mood modifications ,salience , tolerance ,withdrawal symptoms, conflict,and relapse.

This compulsive behavior of hours spent on social media lead to negative behavioral and physical effects and harmful habits that interfere with their daily activities. Some of these harmful habits result in losing interest hanging out with friends, becoming irritable and angry when unable to check social media accounts, complaining of frequent headaches, feeling discomfort in the eyes and having problems falling or staying asleep. More of the extreme effects that social media addictions can cause is obesity,depression and distracted driving (that can lead to death).

According to a study done at the University of Chicago, it was announced that social media addictions were stronger than the addiction to cigarettes and alchohol . At Harvard University “researchers actually hooked people up to functional MRI machine to scan their brains to see what happened when they talk[ed] about themselves (which is a key part of what people do on social media) and they found that self-disclosure communication stimulated the brain's pleasure centers much like sex and food do.(LifeWire).

Interesting right?

A fifteen-year-old Californian girl by the name of Brooke was one of those people who struggled with having a social media addiction.Brooke told ABC News many of the social media accounts that she used daily being :“FaceTime, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Vine, [and] Kik,”.Brooke explained to ABC News that the second her phone notified her of a Snapchat or Facebook message, she would always answer right away and would wait for the other person to reply.Brooke’s social media addiction caused her to stay up until four-thirty every morning.Though Brooks’s parents tried to put an end to her social media addiction by shutting off her phone service and taking her phone away, Brooke always found another way to use her accounts.Brook’s father explained that Brooke would “cry, yell, run upstairs, go in her room,[and] slam the door".(ABC News) "There was no relationship" he explained "we were just a means to provide her with food and shelter and money ... and a phone.” (ABC News).

This is the sad reality we live in when it comes to our generation of technology.

The truth about social media is that it is pushing away those close to us and it is affecting our health in many ways we are unable to see. Instead of putting in the hours spent on social media scrolling though our feeds and waitng for a notification , we can be putting in the time toward pursuing our dreams and spending more time with our families. With so many of us being on social media daily it really makes me think ... is social media killing you? or just killing your time?

And what will you do to stop it?