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

Monica December 21, 2022

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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