We’re raising awareness of Social Media Addiction.
Social media helps us to stay connected to our friends and family all the time, keeping ourselves up to date with all that is happening in their lives and share ours as well, however, the excessive use of it can cause some serious side effects especially if the majority of the usage is targeted towards stalking profiles and checking status updates of other people. This is referring to as social media addiction and based on a study by Chicago University, it is much stronger than an addiction to alcohol or nicotine.
Although, we may think it is not as common as some other addictions like alcoholism or drug use, the users of social media are growing day by day. According to Go-Globe has reached over 2.03 billion out of which around 18% can’t live without checking Facebook updates for a couple of hours. With so much new content uploaded on daily basis including 5 million photos on Instagram and 500 million tweets on Twitter, the users will never get bored and will always find something new and exciting to check out. Excessive use can be disastrous to the health and wellbeing of users if they don’t get restrictive about the amount of time spent on these social media apps.
what are the symptoms of social media addiction?
People with social media addiction can easily spend over an hour flipping and posting on various social media apps. An addict also tends to share every single thought that comes to their mind trying to be seen as active as possible and hoping to get some likes which they consider as validation and appreciation by their followers. Desperately trying to be active all the time in order to stay up to date can also lead to destroying your sleeping habits as well which can lead to odd sleeping hours and insomnia. On the plus side, people also use social media to distract themselves from work or school-related stress. While people often think of drug rehab, rehab can actually be helpful with many different forms of addiction.
Social Media addiction can also cause some severe physical health issues including carpal tunnel syndrome which is a condition that causes tingling, numbness and pain in the hands due to excessive typing. Excessive tapping or typing on a smartphone can cause a serious strain in your fingers tendons and staring at screens for too long can cause strain on your eyes. Apart from these serious side effects, it is also dangerous to check for social media updates on your cellphone while driving since they can cause distraction. Social Media Addiction and other behavioural addiction disorders are something that can be addressed at private rehab.
As far as mental health issues are concerned, the most serious one caused by social media addiction is developing low self-esteem by comparing your lives with the lives of your social media idols as they post about their eye-catching experiences. The ability to share something to the whole world of your social media makes any normal social interaction not worth your time causing you to move further away from the real world and can also be damaging to your ability to learn new skills as you indulge yourself in social media activities.
How can social media addiction be helped?
As with any addiction, the recovery always starts by first identifying it as a problem and then start taking tiny steps to reduce its impact on your life. You can start by disabling push notifications on your smartphones which will stop alerting you whenever something new is posted reducing the urge to reactively checking for it. Try to get yourself occupied with a new hobby or something you use to love before the invasion of social media like reading books, jogging or riding a bike. Whatever you do in your life, do it to cherish the experience and not for the indulgence of your social media viewers.
Addiction can affect anyone, so never feel alone if you are facing this problem. Share Rehab Stories has a collection of stories about peoples journeys through rehab which you can read to feel less alone.
