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Learn All The Ways Social Media Is Ruining Our Lives Below The Surface

Monica December 21, 2022

We’re Paying With Our Lives

Believe it or not, social media isn’t free. We’re paying for it with our lives. Our mental health is at stake. While it may not seem like it, in the long run, we’ll eventually notice it. According to Psych2go, Jacqueline Sperling Ph.D., a psychologist at McLean Hospital describes how social media is designed to be like a slot machine. If players knew what they would be rewarded with for the game, there would be no interest to play in the first place.” Most of us would never play a slot machine at a casino, but we all have multiple social media apps we’re not afraid to use every day. She goes on to say that “the idea of a potential future reward keeps the machine in use. When the outcome is unpredictable, the behavior is more likely to repeat.” Social media is recording and remembering every scroll, click, like, the question asked, and dislike. It’s becoming smarter and smarter, and soon, will probably outsmart us.

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You Give Away Your Day

Think about it. Instead of picking up a book, going on a run, or taking a course to learn a new skill, you’re picking up your phone and scrolling social media, hopelessly devoted to something that’s only making your life worse. If the first thing you do in the morning is roll over and check your messages, you’re not alone. Those first moments in the morning set your mood for the entire day. The first 20 minutes, call the alpha stage, after waking up are the most impressionable part of your day. It’s like a sponge. It soaks up the most valuable information in those first waking moments. So if you’re rolling over and looking at social media, you’re using those precious moments to put false information, judgments, or negative comments into your brain.

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Generations Below Us Will Be Lonelier

If you thought we were a lonely generation because of social media, think about the generations that are born with a phone in their hand. According to Medium, “the generation that was all but born with a device in their hand, 18-24-year-olds, are four times as likely to feel lonely “most of the time” compared to those over 70.” Most of the time is a lot of the time. It’s too much. Social media has backfired. Instead of bringing us closer together as a society, it’s causing us to dig our graves.

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We Have To Distract Ourselves

If you’re ever waiting in line for something, what’s the first thing you do? Pick up your phone! Like the rest of the world, you feel the need to distract while waiting for more than a minute or two. Why focus on the real world when we could distract ourselves with Twitter and Instagram? An interview on Mind Matters speaks about this. Author Doug Smith said, “but not only are we distracted, we almost have to be distracted. If we have five seconds to wait in line, we first think about pulling out our phone and seeing what happened on Twitter. And that’s by design.” We lose focus and feel an immediate urge to reach into our bags and check the latest news. And it’s only getting worse.

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We’re Losing Our Goals

Instead of spending precious hours focusing on our new business or writing a book, we’re spending those hours scrolling social media and comparing ourselves to others. “Online stardom is often considered an alternative to a prestigious job. Instead of working hard and acquiring the skills to gain a decent job, people are often distracted by social media. Achieving our goals takes a lot of hard work and drive, but we may take the easy route and become distracted” (via Medium). Thanks to social media and the ease that comes with falling into scrolling and posting for immediate gratification, people don’t have enough of an attention span to spend enough time focusing on their goals.

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We Need To Work Harder

We’re not talking about working harder at your job. We’re talking about working harder to break the addiction and negative feedback loop many of us have fallen into. One of the ways to do this is to set a timer for your apps. It’s challenging to monitor how much time you spend on social media, especially if you’re not paying attention to it. It suddenly becomes second nature, and you’re left mindlessly picking up the phone. To combat this, “you can set a timer (or even better, a time limit!) to do the work for you. Most timers will give you a warning when you are about to exceed your time limit. This can help you become more self-aware while providing you with better self-control” (via Psych2go).

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