Social media has ultimately changed the lives of the online community in our generation. It affects people’s lives more than we realize.
Source: pixabay.com
Social media has been the most promising thing ever in human history. It allows us to utilize our smartphones to stay connected. It makes us scroll endlessly on beautiful things around us that we do not happen to see often. But with all its benefits, it somehow seems to be doing more damage to our physical health or cause and mental health issues. So before creating a profile and joining social media communities, we should be aware of social media apps policies and guidelines.
What Are The Other Possible Damages Of Social Media Effects?
It Often Affects Sleep Negatively
The reason social media platforms deprive us of our sleep is not entirely limited to wanting to be with our phones for a longer period. Instead, it is about the disruption of our natural sleep rhythm. Our mobile devices, particularly our computers and smartphones, emit blue light inhibiting our body’s production of melatonin. That blue light entirely ruins our circadian sleep rhythm. It gives us unwanted mental stimulation right at the wrong time.
Social Media Will Rob Your Time
While social connectivity sites can be a great pastime and a source of relaxation for others, it does not hide the fact that it robs us of quality time with ourselves and others. Studies show that using the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube can increase time spent on our devices, making us more socially isolated and unaware of our surroundings. It outright keeps us from seeing friends and somehow prevents us from forming a new healthy relationship.
Social media platforms honestly are responsible for most of our missed opportunities as it makes us shut out of the real world.
It Constantly Impedes Your Personal Obligations
Along with the negative impact of social media use and presence, such as robbing us of our precious time, it also affects us in terms of our goals in life. Social channel makes us lose our limitation of ourselves and forget all our responsibilities and healthy boundaries.
Whether it relates to home duties, school requirements, or work-related tasks, it can sap our time and energy into something unrelated to our real-life obligations. It distracts us from doing what we have to do.
Source: pixabay.com
It Increases Your Anxiety And Depression
Many studies have shown social media as a contributing factor to our anxiety and depression nowadays. It has something to do with the quality of socializing that we do. Yes, it is helpful in terms of finding an emotional connection and searching for the best new support groups.
However, in most cases, negative interactions such as bullying, trolling, video sharing, and posing can contribute a lot to our overall dysfunction. Social anxiety and depression from social media also have a lot to do with our distorted view of other users from different social media platforms. Since a person can have a large following online, it becomes difficult to focus on setting boundaries.
High Chance Of Honestly Getting Addictive
Social media is built to connect people whenever and wherever they are. There is something about social media usage that hooks us without even realizing the bad side effects of using too much of it. Social media causes addiction as it increases low self-esteem and bad sleep patterns, and promotes prolonged stress.
Social media addiction is a disorder that affects individuals, mostly young adults, due to the increasingly unrealistic perception of life and beauty in general.
It Also Encourages Envy
One way social media ruins our self-confidence is its contribution to the negative feeling called envy. However, there is nothing wrong with looking at some other people’s achievements and admiring their lavish lives. But users share information like vacation photos, luxurious bags, and high-tech gadgets that sometimes make us feel hopeless, it wreaks havoc on our self-esteem.
The posts users create on social networking sites make us compare our lives to others while questioning our capabilities. Thus, social media makes us feel dissatisfied with our reality and make us unappreciative of our achievements.
Source: pixabay.com
Social Media Makes An Interpretation More Difficult To Know If It Is Real Or Not
According to a licensed professional counselor from the American counseling association, another issue with social media posts is the unrealistic interpretation of personal profiles and everything. The best example to start with is beauty, where the audience finds it a norm to add filters almost in every photo they take. But social media is not only limited to that. In terms of information, it gets to the bottom of the struggle of determining fact versus fake.
It can influence to believe even the most unrealistic stuff
posted, liked, and shared by thousands of adults and young people. Creating content on social media websites becomes the number one source of illegitimate scope and unnecessary status updates .
Why Can Too Much Social Media Usage Affect Our Ability To Communicate And Interact?
Too much social media interaction already affected our communication and interaction with other people. Social media sites make us unable to think through our actions and behaviors because we cannot see others’ facial expressions on this social media platform. A social media site, such as Facebook, makes us quick to judge and often makes us believe the first thing we see online.
Popular social media websites make us emotionally inexperienced in navigating different societal situations. That explains why instead of talking about mistakes and patching things up, it becomes easier to block and unfriend facebook users because their opinion is not well-received.
A Friendly Reminder
If you or your loved ones have been dealing with social media issues, find out how social media counseling may be able to help you. Because regardless of how users engage in their social media accounts, some of them still suffer negatively. Seek mental health professionals, send direct messages or talk to a mental health provider for clinical advice.