Today 30th June is Social Media day, a day to celebrate the revolution it has made in our lives. This article might prove irony today, but then which occasion can be greater than a day to celebrate and to limit its use?
Social media, attractive yet addictive, useful yet distracting and positive as well as negative. Social media is a boon for those who know how to use it in the correct way and a curse for those who don’t know how to productively invest their time in social media. Sometimes people just don’t understand how much time they are spending on various social media sites and gradually they get addicted to social media. We generally don’t understand that it is addiction, but when we don’t have any access to a mobile, laptop, desk or network, our behavior suddenly changes and people around us understand that we are getting addicted to social media.
- Why do we get addicted to social media?
After using social media or while using it, we feel happy or relaxed. That means dopamine secrets in our brain. Suddenly, our brain catches this activity as a rewarding activity and our brain gets engaged with the repetition of this activity. The brain encourages this reward-gaining behavior. But at that point, the brain is unable to understand the temporary use of social media. And keep doing the same thing, which is known as addiction.
- If you don’t want to be an addicted person, then here are 5 ways to control social media use and stay away from it.
1. Get clear about your purpose of using social media
Remember when you first learned about social media and why you started using it. Compare our initial stage with current thoughts about why we spend time on social media. Once we get clear about our intention of using social media and bombard that point in our brain, we will automatically start controlling our time on social media. Keep one thing in mind; social media is filler in our lives. It’s not the last aim to achieve.
2. Start exercise on a regular basis
Continuous use of the phone or computer is not good for our eyes as well as our whole body, because we generally sit or roll over on our bed when we scroll. Thus, our body is not used to exercise. So starting exercise, may it be gym or yoga, will make you feel fresh, relax your muscles and will help you to stay focused. Exercise will bring you into real life engagement. Also, there is another benefit that if you start going out for walking, jogging, yoga or gym, your interaction with people will increase and you will start socializing for real, which will reduce your screen time.
3. Keep notification off
Keep all the notifications of your social media platforms off. So that when you are working on your device, you won’t get disturbed due to the popping sound of the notification. Ultimately, your curiosity and urge to click on the notification to understand the whole scenario on social media will go away.
4. Set a social media timer
Completely detached from social media is a really bad option. If you want to get over something, first you must reduce the use of that particular thing. Here also, if you set a timer for your social media interactions and scrolling, it will benefit you. In a simple language, we have particular time to sleep, to work, to eat, just like that, give a particular amount of time to use social media. So you won’t get fomo (feeling of missing out) and you will be able to restrict your social media use.
5. Developing new hobbies
Apart from meme sharing, reel making and scrolling, develop new hobbies. There are lots of things in the world to learn. Invest your time in things you like except social media. Think about the things you haven’t done or things which you wanted to do for a long time but couldn’t do. It can be anything: dancing, music, sports, new languages, painting, pottery, craft, cooking, reading, writing your own stuff and many more. Once you start loving what you do, you yourself won’t spend much time on social media.
Little more effort and you can easily avoid the overuse of social media. Keep doing.
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