How Having a Social Media Detox Can Help You With Your Anxiety Levels
Social media is all about staying in touch with your family, friends, others you may know and the entire rest of the world. Its about sharing life updates through statuses and pictures and keeping up on what everybody else has going on. Social media also gives you a place to network and connect with companies and share your work with the world and build a following, or help support someone else’s work.
With the typing of some keys and clicks of a mouse, so many things can be posted, liked, shared and commented in the world of social media, and with so many different platforms to choose from, its almost impossible to find new threads to learn from or laugh at.
Social media can be a great tool to connect and network and can really enhance your life in multiple ways, but much like being out in the real world, this cyber society can also wear down your mental. Sometimes the things you see on social media are just too much for you.
Sometimes you need to go on a little social media detox.
Social media can cause a lot of anxiety for a lot of its users and cause some to go as far as taking a break by logging out of their accounts for awhile or shutting them down entirely. A detox from it all is great for helping you achieve things like:
Getting Away From Drama.
Drama is everywhere you turn when you log into social media. You can likely find an argument in any comment section under any status, see people personally attacking others with harsh words or sharing content that you might not agree with or make you feel uncomfortable.
Users love to speak without a filter on social media because they feel safe and secure behind their screen, and with a relatively even playing field as every other social media user, they finally feel the courage to assert themselves. Being on the other side of an argument, personal attack or uncomfortable post can raise your anxiety more than a few notches.
Taking a social media detox will give you a break from dealing with any of this nonsense. The drama isn’t going anywhere, but removing yourself can take you away from a stressful place and give you the opportunity to turn your focus onto others things.
Avoiding Bad News And Hoaxes
Social media is the place most people go nowadays for their news, which makes it easier than ever for fake news stories to make its way to everybody’s news feed.
Fake news stories about anything from rumors of celebrity deaths to earth’s “doomsday” are able to spread so rapidly in the world we live in today because people are going off of what the headlines tell them instead of actually going in and reading the article more than ever before (because apparently reading the story is too much work).
People will believe in anything that anyone says on social media, and when the real stories by credible sources are released, many people can’t tell whether its real or not anymore. As a result of this constant uncertainty, users can begin to feel anxious about any type of news that they see on social platforms.
You’ll eventually hear about the bad news stories from someone, but taking a social media detox will help you avoid hearing about the fake ones.
Actually Living Your Life
So many of us tend to get so absorbed by scrolling social media and doing everything we can to capture pictures and videos to create a lasting memory instead of viewing life through our own eyes.
So many of us turn to social networking to make attempts at love because of our shyness and social anxieties. Too many of us use social media as our only means of communication with our friends and family.
Too many of us want the world to pay attention to the way we live and too many pay attention to the way others live, but we don’t pay enough attention to ourselves.
So many of us have grown so comfortable with living life through social media that we’ve fallen out of touch with the real world.
Social anxiety is real, and a handful of us struggle with this issue, but you can’t work through the pressure of socializing behind a screen. Having a social media detox gives you a great chance to just focus on connecting with your family, friends and the rest of the world on a more natural level, and gives you the opportunity to embrace all the moments you live in life instead of letting your phone live them for you.
Quitting The Competition
Social media almost feels like a big popularity contest.
Whether we think so or not, we almost always try to compete to see who can get the most followers and the most friends on a social media platform to show how much more “popular” we are than everybody else. We often look to post statuses or pictures in an attempt to get as many like reactions as possible or draw in the most comments because tallying up plenty of each makes your post more noticeable. We check back to our lasted post to Instagram or tweet on Twitter to see how many likes and retweets we’ve received. We post “go like my recent post” and “follow/add me” statuses across different platforms to expand and grow our following and like counts.
To sum it all up, we care too much about how many likes we get and how many followers we have compared to the next person. Take a social media detox and get away from the reaction race and the follower contest and go out and do some things that you like yourself.
As great a place and tool as social media is and can be, it can also be a place full of drama, fake news, false realities and clout chasers, and all of the negatives that trickle down your news feed on an hour-by-hour basis can really take its toll on your anxiety levels. This is why it is good for your mind and your emotions to have a social media detox every once in a while to recharge your cyber-social battery.
