Social media has now become indispensable in this new age for many people. It will not be surprising if we find someone to be on social media when they open their eyes in the morning, or when they are pooping in the toilet, or when they are eating on the dining table and needs to urgently upload food porn on their timeline, or when they’re out on a date, or at a stadium watching FIFA, or in bed trying to sleep in the blue light of their cellphone’s screen.
Apart from jokes, all of this can easily sound like a terrible disease.
Image Source : https://pixabay.com
Here are some of the important ways how social media is messing up with your health and brain:
- Sedentary lifestyle
All the hours you spend on the social media are the hours that you spend sitting somewhere or lying down uselessly. Many doctors now have a consensus on the fact that Sitting is the new Smoking. Simply stated, it’s not hard to imagine the bad effects of smoking and what it does to our body. Sitting, on the other hand, is now considered to damage our body in more or less the same way. Health-wise, sitting is the worst thing we can do. And here we sit, writing at one end and reading at the end.
But you’d probably want to continue reading until this article finishes because there is a lot more coming.
Most of us addictively scroll the social media mindlessly to find an escape. We want to distract our brain from thinking what we don’t want to think and keep it busy in information overload coming straight out of social media. But does this addictive strategy really work in order to make us feel better? We are now facing a new dimension of challenges like bullying on social media and Facebook depression.
- Social Media Addiction
Just like coke and smoking can be addictive, researchers have discovered that social media is highly addictive. The user can become dependent on it and possibly fail to give it up under any circumstances. The user may feel depressed or despondent in absence of social media. The brain can start feeling about it the same way a smoker’s brain feels about cigarettes and how it responds without it. A typical user with this condition will experience extreme mood swings, remain mentally occupied, become intolerant, sad and neglect the basics of personal life. All these traits may be found in a mentally depressed or addictive person. Experiences show that such people may cut themselves off completely from social interaction and choose to remain in isolation.
- Emotional Damage
To start with, it sucks out all the energy form your brain that you can use to do several other productive things. Apart from that, it lowers a person’s self-esteem by constantly letting him or her compares their lives with the lives of others, their achievements with the achievement of others and continuously feels bad about themselves. The more social media they remain involved in, the less happy they start to feel and their life satisfaction starts reducing. People fall into narcissism, and constantly tries to showcase themselves as a person who has a great life. They get into a mental competition of expressing themselves having a better life than others. And even when they feel that they have been successful achieving the task, that will still be unhealthy for them.
It’s mentally damaging to compare our lives with the lives of others in either way
- The light, your eyes, your brain
It won’t be a news to learn that excessively staring on your mobile phone screen can not only tire your eyes but also exhaust your brain. The blue light coming from our screens tricks our brains into thinking that it’s still day. As a result, we find it hard to sleep if we are continuously using our electronic devices, as our eyes and our brain will remain wide awake.
- The fire of Envy
Jealousy is an extremely bad and damaging feeling that burns people emotionally, and also make them fall into performing evil actions in the fire of it that they would never think about doing in normal situations. Jealousy can easily turn into vengeance and harm other people in one way or another. And nevertheless, it will damage the jealous person mentally. Comparing your life with the lives of others on social media can easily make someone fall into the trap of jealousy. Seeing your friends traveling the world and achieving all those amazing things might make you feel deprived off. Social media provides a breeding ground for such negative feelings, which has an effect on the overall psychology of the patient.
- Information overload
We receive an astounding amount of information from social media, and we end up learning dozens of things that are useless to us. In the process, we consume or rather waste our mental energy that could’ve been used to learn something that means something to us or something that is productive.
- We feel like it will help us
Our brains are trapped into thinking that we’re going to be okay once we get along with the world on social media. Despite knowing very well that in the end, we will end up with a feeling of regret and loss of time and energy and a feeling that we have wasted hours on uselessly scrolling, we still go for it and spend hours on it trying to scroll continuously to find something entertaining. We also get trapped in the illusion of having so many friends on social media, while in reality none of them is actually our friend.
There are, however, some benefits of social media which we can’t ignore. For instance, we can keep up with the latest updates, stay in touch with the people we know, learn something about the topics related to our job, get in touch with the relevant advertisement that is there on the social media, engage with the people by joining relevant groups and so on.
Conclusion
Despite it, just like any other technology we need to use the social media in the right way. Just like nuclear energy can be used for constructive and destructive purposes, social media is also a tool for both constructive and destructive outcomes. All we need to make sure is that we dominate it instead of letting it dominate us. Enjoy Steem but stay reasonable.