How Social Media Affects Your Mental Health
In life, we all need someone with who we can stay connected to make progress in life. It can relieve stress, anxiety, and sadness, but poor social connections can have a negative impact on mental health.
The rapid increase of social media over the past years has made a brand new means of human interaction. We started using social media from Orkut to Facebook just to keep in touch with friends. We are lost in it that so much. It’s getting in the way of our connections with friends and family.
Social Media Frenzy:
Social media has become a major part of our daily life. Every single one of us spent most of our day on several different social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other popular social media platform.
But what social media is:
Social media is the means of communication among people through which they build, share and exchange information and views to various online networks.
The novel coronavirus situation turned everything from the comfort of our home. From buying our groceries online to taking classes, everything turned online.
From doctors to nurses, everyone experienced a tough time. Especially final year medical students were also asked to perform their duties in hospitals which were difficult for them, and opting for the best nursing assignment help for their submission was the only yet smart option. It seems like online is the new color instead of orange.
All That Glitter Is Not Gold:
Social media has transformed our lives. We have easy access to information, can find products and services, reviews, and live video streaming, and much more.
Everything we know so far about social media is all positive, and we just a click away from each other. There’s a dark side too that we can’t unsee, which includes cyberbullying, wrong information, hate groups, and much more.
Studies show that increased anxiety and stress are linked to the use of social media. Here is the list that is highlighting how social media is affecting the mental health of individuals.
1. The feeling of insufficiency:
Social media users start to compare themselves with each other when they see one is progressing better in his life than the other. They see the achievements, photos, and relationship status on social media platforms which generates the feeling of inadequacy.
2. It’s an addiction:
Continuous use of the cellphones and social media accounts will make you an addict. Users end up using cell phones for hours and start to neglect their personal life, studies, and activities that are good for health.
3. Less in-person meetings:
Social media users sometimes suffer from a social anxiety disorder which is feeling extreme fear in a social gathering. Individuals who suffer from this face trouble interacting with other people in a social get-together.
4. Anxiety:
People, especially youngsters, invest a lot of time on their social media profiles, from uploading pictures to sharing memes. They experience pressure to have a good photo and later for comments, all of which cause anxiety.
People share thousands of posts daily, which can upset their friends who are on social media. Social media users, especially girls, worry about the judgments they might face on any picture or post. They go through some posts which can make them think that they are not smart and successful enough like them.
5. Sleep deprivation:
Yes! Social media users become night owls. Staying late and surfing from one social media to another affects sleep, causes stress and depression, which also have a huge impact on the overall health of the user.
6. Lack of Activities:
Daily use of cellphones, checking social media platforms all the time can decrease the interest in several different other activities.
Laying in bed all day roaming from one social media platform to another can affect your health. Only one calorie burn an hour due to lack of activities which results in obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular problems, blood pressure issues, bones issues, and neck problems.
7. Jealousy and hate:
Believe in the evil eye? We all are surrounded by it as we share our daily life with those people who we don’t even know properly. People will be jealous of you after watching your perfectly happy life on social media, unknown of the fact that not all diamonds are shiny.
They start to hate the fact that how they are so happy, why I m not like them?. This all causes a feeling of sadness among them.
8. Eating disorders:
Users, especially girls who spent a lot of their time on the social media platform, shows great concerns related to body image, which leads to eating disorders. They try to compete with their friends for the sake of comments and likes on a picture
9. Distraction among couples:
Couples spent most of their time on cell phones than with each other, which leads to fighting about they don’t have time for each other and their family.
10: Lack of feelings:
When users interact through social media daily. They can’t feel the actual emotions of other people, which leads to a lack of genuine feelings towards the ones who are experiencing real-life problems.
It’s like a communication gap as we can’t see the facial expressions or hear the voice tone. Someone trying to be funny and sarcastic online can also create a lot of misunderstandings.
Friendships and dating relationships suffer a lot as people tend to trust less the person behind the screen due to the lack of empathy.
11. Inability to focus:
Social media addicts find difficulty in focusing on their daily tasks due to the habit of constantly checking the phone from time to time.
Students suffering from focus problems buy custom assignments online to meet deadlines for the assignment and projects. It can be good as gold, but overuse of social media is up to no good.
Conclusion:
Try to create a balance in your life which also includes limiting the use of social media to maintain your mental health.
