Negative Effect Of Social Media On Our Mental Health
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Social media is a big world on it's own, nowadays it seems to be happening more than the real world. A lot of us spend more time on social media than we spend doing other things physically. Personally, I can't imagine what the world would have been without social media.
However, like everything else social media also has it's bad and good side. It's effects can strike us in every area of life if we don't set limits and boundaries.
Social media is one of the places where information is cheaply spread. Sometimes you don't necessarily need to ask for them, you will find them popping up on your screen.
Every kind of life one wants to live can be found on those platforms. The annoying part is that most of the lifestyle and informations given on those platforms are fake.
If there is anything I am careful about in life is my mental health, I don't know about you but for me, it's a priority, that's why I know when and where to stop when navigating on social media.
I remember a time one of my friends was telling me how she had to go on break from Facebook for some months because of the way it was messing up her mind.
Don't think far, he's her problem, down here in Nigeria, once a lady clocks 25, her family and people around start pressuring her about marriage. She happened to be in that situation and Facebook was making it worse by showing her pictures of her friends who are recently getting married and you know to worsen the whole thing, some of them use go tag her.
It became a serious concern for her, she was already losing her mind. You know how it hurts when you are trying to build courage and then you see something that just comes and sweeps it all away and bringing everything to the ground. I had to encourage her not to give up and also advised her to stay away from Facebook and keep building herself for now.
I have been in a situation where I felt life was not working out for me and I went online and saw my friend posting about their achievements, snapping with expensive clothes, holding expensive phones and others. I was so devastated, I felt like life was against me.
See others progressing but I seem to be stuck, it messed up my head, and different thoughts began to run through my head. I started feeling bad and frustrated eventually and I became depressed. It was a very good friend of mine who noticed I was not okay. He had to reach out to me and counsel me over those things and I regained my sanity subsequently.
As good as social media is, it can also be a threat to our mental well-being if we don't discipline our minds enough. A lot of the life people are displaying out there is just for a show-off, most of them don't really have that kind of life in reality.
The expensive life, the perfect love life, the smiles and all you see people exhibiting on social media that is making you go crazy and feel as if you are lagging behind are not all real, some are fake and you don't have to live like them, maybe that's where our problem lies.
Sometimes, people might be going through a difficult situation and hoping for a change from the government, then suddenly social media will present a video or news that will cause more pain than good scattering the little hope they are building. Funny enough sometimes, those things are even false. This why I don't even believe anything i see on social media until I verify from other sources.
Social media is a double edged sword, it can be a tool to sharpen your mind and it can be a tool to scatter it and put you in tension. You just have to know how to use it.
Set limits and know the kind of things you consume from it and don't try to be like anyone you see out there, this will keep your mental health in place.
My kind advice to people is to adjust the way they live their lives on social media, you must not try to impress anyone. These days any little people do, they are already rushing to get their cameras to capture it. What for? You bought new clothes, you video it and post it on social media, you bought a car you snap it and send it on social media, isn't that getting out of hand?
You might be doing it with a good mind but it might be affecting another person negatively out there, you must not make all your life public. In Fact, you might even be exposing yourself to danger by some of those things.