Social media is quickly transforming and evolving. During the past decade, social media has surged and considerably affected people’s lives. The presence of the internet and smartphones has raised social media usage for everyone.
It is hard to live without social media. Though it is fun to utilize social media for posting stories, photos, sharing your experiences and thoughts, and becoming updated with the latest trends and news, you can plunge into the dark side of social media also.
Social media apps like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, and Tumbir have opened avenues to link to people worldwide. It can be said to make a positive impact on our lives. But have you considered the downsides of Social media?
Can you remember the last time you placed down your phone for five minutes and took it up within a minute? Did you thoughtlessly scroll through the feed and post correlating your life to others? If so, you may have fallen prey to the dark side of social media.
Let us glance through the list of negative effects of social media on the lives of people and do you find any of these as your personal issues? If so, then you need to give second thoughts to your social media use and reduce it to a large extent.
Distress And Anxiety
One of the most marked negative effects social media exerts on people is their mental wellness. Excessive usage of social media applications can cause mental health problems like depression and anxiety disorder.
If you spend a few hours on social media, it could adversely impact your mood and level of well-being. Nothing is as it appears, and it is mainly true regarding social media.
People spending excessive time on social media like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, etc., are more probable to experience loneliness, mood swings, and symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Reading and surfing through the unrealistic news, photos videos, and posts of others can stimulate your brain to match your lives to theirs, which is essentially untrue, leading to psychological distress.
Issues Of Body Image And Self-Esteem
Social media is crowded with people who showcase their finest version possible, whether their status, lifestyle, physical appearance, or job profile. You can view many models and influencers on social media who illustrate their best appearances and lives.
Unfortunately, social media is altering the concept of how beauty is viewed. The constant revelation of unrealistic beauty standards, lifestyles and images on social media can create feelings of overawe in people’s minds.
Contrasting yourself to others online makes you assess yourself inferiorly regarding your body image and can result in dissatisfaction, body image issues, and reduced self-worth. It can also generate eating disorders in some people, especially teenagers suffer from lessened self-esteem arising from the effects of social media.
Moreover, the use of image editors, photoshop and filters are readily available. The hugely edited photos through these editors generate unrealistic body images, and people incline to judge their own looks.
Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO)
This is a phenomenon that got popular near the same time as the upsurge of social media. It is amongst the most prevalent negative effects of social media on society.
FOMO is simply what is seems like: a type of anxiety that you acquire when you fear being left out on a beneficial experience that somebody else is undergoing. For instance, you might repeatedly check your messages to view if anyone has requested you out, or concentrate on your Instagram feed throughout the day to ensure that nobody is achieving something cool without you. You may also view pictures of something enjoyable that your friends got to do, feeling deprived that you could not go as you had another obligation.
This fear gets constant fodder from what you view on social media. With growing social network use, there is an improved chance for you to view that someone is having greater fun than you are presently. That is precisely what leads to FOMO, so if you are susceptible to this, know how to avoid FOMO when using social media (or give up using it altogether).
Harmful Sleep Patterns
Besides raising the cases of depression and anxiety, another harmful thing concerning social media is that spending excessive time on it can result in poor sleep. Many studies have displayed that growing use of social media has an adverse effect on your sleep quality.
If you apprehend that your sleep patters have become erratic, leading to a fall in productivity, reduce the amount of time you surf social media.
This becomes overwhelming when utilizing your phone in bed during the night. This can hinder your sleep time, making you feel unproductive, fagged out, and drained the following day. It is simple to tell yourself that you will dedicate 5 minutes going through your Facebook notifications, simply to realize after an hour that you have been aimlessly scrolling through some absurdity on Twitter that you do not even bother about.
The blue light radiation from the mobile screens in injurious for the eyes, and continuously checking your social media accounts in the night can even cause insomnia, a sleep disorder.
Do not allow social media algorithms, which are crafted to retain your attention for the maximum time possible, rob your valuable sleep. Managing less sleep, and that too of a poor quality is a harmful combination.
Common Addiction
Social media can be more addictive than alcohol and cigarettes. It has a strong appeal for many people that makes them check it all the time without even bothering about it.
If you are unsure whether you are hooked to social networks, try to recollect the last time you spent a whole day without checking your social media accounts. Do you feel shunned if someone unfollows you? And if your most liked social networks totally vanished tomorrow, would the absence make you feel dejected and empty?
Ultimately, social media sites wish to keep you scrolling for the maximum possible time so that they can display you plenty of ads and earn more money. Due to the attention economy, these sites require your eyes on them for as long as it can. Apps such as TikTok supply you a continuous barrage of quick videos that takes it toll on your attention span.
Simply because you have been going exorbitant on social media use does not imply you necessarily require to remove your entire social networking accounts. Nonetheless, if you consider leaving it is the highly effective solution for you, it is not a bad idea.
Leads To Cyberbullying
Prior to social media, bullying was only possible to execute face-to-face. Nevertheless, now people can bully others online – anonymously or otherwise. Presently everyone is aware about cyberbullying, and many of us have seen how it can affect a person.
While social media renders it simpler to meet new people and forge friendships, it also permits sadistic people to rip into others with slight effort. Culprits of bullying can utilize the anonymity that a few social networks offer to acquire people’s faith and then terrorize them before their peers. For example, they may set up a fake profile and behave amicably to a classmate, then later deceive, and disturb them online.
These online invasions frequently leave heavy mental scars and even cause people to harm themselves or commit suicide, in some instances. As it reveals, cyberbullying does not simply affect kids. Adults can fall prey to online abuse, also. Since screens conceal our faces, you can finish being a fool on social media and other portals without even knowing it.
Harms Relationships And Privacy
Even the mere availability of a phone can hamper how we cultivate and maintain relationships as per some research. 55% of Americans mention their partner is disturbed by their cell phone while they are attempting to engage in a conversation with them – which can cause problems. Growing evidence indicates that social media use can exert a negative effect on general relationship dynamics and quality.
Researchers in Canada discovered that women spent considerably more time on Facebook than men and felt substantially more jealousy when they or their ally were scrolling – although negative emotions were mentioned by both sexes. Social media can become a marked threat to romantic liaisons when boundaries are not distinctly defined.
There are numerous ways to fix boundaries within your relationship. Expending quality time away from technology and social media is also essential in keeping healthy relationships. You could explore some ecofriendly outdoor date ideas or set up a picnic date for two and relish the bounty of nature simultaneously.
Wrapping Up
While social media offers numerous benefits, such as associating with others, fostering relationships, and knowing new things, it can also adversely impact both mentally and physically.
With the growing rate of social media users, social media will probably be there for the remainder of our lives. So, it is essential to know about the negative effects of social media, and how it impacts our reality.
Thus, it is crucial to ensure that we are not completely immersed in the online world and arrive at a stage where we cannot distinguish between social media and reality. We should realize where to draw the line, as not everything on social media is true.
