YOU'RE GETTING TOO ATTACHED

It is killing your self worth

Now lets be honest to ourselves

When we wake up in the morning the first thing we do is reach out to our phones open Instagram and snapchat and check all of social media right?

Yes, I thought so. For 90% of the teenagers and people in this generation, this is the daily routine and this is how they start their day

Have you realised how this affects your entire day? Have you thought about the numerous negative effects this is having on yourself and your mental health? Have you realised that this literally controls your mood and mental state for half a day? Let’s say you wake up to something negative, something displeasuring, half your day is wasted because the first thing you have seen and read about is this and it stays in your head or even if it doesn’t stay it surely passes negative vibration.

Firstly let me make it clear, the motive of this is not to make anyone stop using social media because even i know i wont even after this it is a part of our lives but this is to make you understand the effect this is having on us so we can stop getting so emotionally attached to these platforms and so we can at least try and control our usage and time we are investing on it. If you read this till the very end i promise you this will open your eyes.

To be completely honest, even I have the same habit waking up in the morning and first sitting on my phone not realising how much time has passed by and i admit it but a part of writing this blog is also because it helps me in my self improvement too and i realised that this daily habit that most of us follow is so harmful.

Get control over yourself

I am 100% sure that everyone reading this has at least a few times had the same thought that social media is killing us its affecting our mental health our peace and so many other factors that we don’t realise.

We as humans love having control and we know that but the thing we are not realising is that this is the main area of our lives where we have almost no control over ourselves. These apps control us, our mood, our state of mind, our happiness and as far as our thought process. It is that deep.

People have been wasting literally hours and hours of their time in a day stalking random people who you don’t even know and have no relevance to them whatsoever but will still waste so much valuable time on this. You think it’s time to go and sleep and open Instagram for a last time just to “check” and before you know it an hour has passed and you haven’t even realised it. They have literally so much control over us to take away an hour for no reason and we don’t even realise it.

It is controlling our mood

Everyone knows what reels are. Everyone knows Instagram knows what we talk about what we listen to what we think everything. How the algorithm of this app works is that they will look at what every user is talking about and what kind of things he/she is looking at and exactly according to that they will form an explore page for us which will be so attractive we will want to look at every post and reel on it. They form a reel page for us with the exact same topics that we talk and think about to get us to watch more and more of them hence increasing the screen time. If we are in a sad mood we all have experienced this that the reels we get will also be from the depressing pages relating to topics we think about and therefore making it more relatable and comforting for us which makes us inevitably spend more time. When we see the sad reels what we don’t realise is it is in turn making us sadder and think about the upsetting topics more than we should be thinking about. THIS IS HOW THEY ARE LITERALLY CONTROLLING OUR MOOD. Imagine just think how much we have lost control over ourselves

These multi-billion dollar companies have experts and professionals working 15 hours a day on their devices who get paid absurd amounts to about 500,000$ with 1 simple instruction - to increase retention. These professionals then do every which is possible altering the tiniest of details to increase retention of each user by about @ minutes and if you multiply that by each user they have you get unreal numbers.

They have controlled us to the extent where we are emotionally invested in it and the notification colour and sound itself sends dopamine to our brains and its like an instant buzzer in our heads that takes a lot of our attention towards it.

Creating self doubt and lowering self worth.

On these social media apps most of the things we get on our suggested is influencers, models and people who everyone aspires to be or look like. We don’t realise that these photoshopped edited photos are affecting us in a negative manner way more than aspirational. We waste so much mental space thinking and wishing we were more like them or our partner looked more like them. What we don’t see is what is the truth behind the app and how it is in real life because everyone wants to portray only the best 2% of themselves and their lives which a few people envy and waste time thinking over when the truth is we don’t even know the reality. If we keep wishing keep being envious of such factors that do not even affect us a little and are not realistic then how will we ever be satisfied and content and grateful for what we have. For example, let us take a hungry man who is also on a weight loss journey and is scrolling through Instagram. He obviously has spoken to his friends on DM about this and how it makes him hungry and it’s difficult. Here the algorithm comes in play where they see this and the next thing that man will see on his reels is a food video and on his stories he will see an ad of 20% off on Zomato, this will lead him to ordering food or at least increase his temptations and hunger which as a result messes with his weight loss goal. He will then see a man 10x fitter than him have thoughts of losing hope and may give up on his goal.

Once again, I am not saying you have to quit the platforms but hopefully realise the negative effects and use the platform efficiently and positively without getting too attached or addicted. Although if a person is spending hours and hours on it 3,4,5 hours a day that is very harmful and if its talking to a friend then you could spend the same time meeting the friend or speaking on call which would be a better way of bonding too.

All I mean is, one should have control over how much time he/she is using here and realising the pros of this. It will help in -

• Reducing unhealthy comparisons therefore improving mental health

• Free up a LOT of time to be more productive

• Help you focus on matters which actually matter more

• Remove cheap dopamine and make you appreciate the little things in life

To conclude, social media is not harmful at all when used correctly and in right proportions and is actually helpful at times but it is important we be aware of what we are getting into and how much time and energy we are spending on this. Hope you had an impactful takeaway from this. This was it for today, looking forward to the next one :)