8 Social Media things that affect Mental Health

 

 

How Social Media affects Mental Health?

1. STOPPING DOPAMINE LEVELS

Social media changes our mood and increases dopamine levels that make the mind feel relax and happy. This is something when you have to wait for hours somewhere or trying to get to sleep. Social media is not only the way to pass the time but it can also stop you from being happy.

A 2013 study1from the journal Plos one discovered that the eager social media users feel less satisfied not with just the job but also their social circles.

The people who used less the accounts were more confident and motivated.

Another study published in the American Journal of preventative medicine2 practiced this on various social media platforms.

The results were the same, social media had a negative effect on people’s happiness and more addicted users had higher isolation.

Even if the user has a lot of friends still he will feel lonely and less satisfied. It is true social media is used to pass the time but still, it can stand in the way of your happiness.

 

 

2. RELYING ON POSITIVE STRENGTHS

 

Social media is all about views, likes, comments, and the audience interaction; the more each of them with the post more the channel performs. These are all different types of positive strengths. When you get rewarded for something you achieved or for a good job are positive strengths.

FOR EXAMPLE:

Father buys chocolate cake for his daughter as a result of good grades in her examinations. Father here is trying to strengthen the good work with a positive reward that her daughter likes.

On social media, different compliments are nothing but someone giving you a chocolate cake. Each compliment makes you feel strong, motivated, and good about yourself.

These are the type of comments and likes that tell you that they all like you and respect you and keep motivating you. The next time you post a video or picture online you feel it a special occasion. These make you even crazier to publish one post after another until you start posting on social media on a daily and regular basis.

This forcefully makes you start relying upon positive strengths to make you feel good and motivated all time.

This can be dangerous and instead one should start appreciating themselves to get inspired & motivated. It can be tough to motivate ourselves in the initial stage as we have forgotten, but practice makes this happen.

It can be messy if you are fishing for getting positive compliments online through social media.

 

 

3. EFFECTS ON RELATIONSHIP

Social media has the power to break relationships; it can pull down your friends and create tension between the two. It also weakens both, trust and loyalty you both have with each other.

For Example:

If you are at a dinner out with friends at your favorite restaurant and your friend is more involved with the mobile phone. This situation will embarrass you more making bad impacts on your friendship.

This happens all the time for people who make an over usage of social media. They spend more time looking at their mobile device and less in a face to face interaction. They also check out their mobile phones without notifications which are a bad habit that might affect friendship or relationship.

  

4. WORK DISTURBANCES

 

Social media and negative thoughts are connected with each other in a deep and strong relationship. When you feel stressed or sad social media provides you to get lost in other people's posts and topics leaving behind the sadness.

Other activities like watching TV & playing video games also distract your attention from whatever you are supposed to be doing. Social media disturbs your motivation and productivity in such a way that no other activity does it.

This is how it works: Each time you see people doing an amazing activity like family dinner, traveling, etc but these profiles make you feel sad about your boring life. You start to compare your lives with theirs who post good things which make you feel sad about yourselves. This type of comparison breaks your stamina and energy to do your work. This is because you are not satisfied with the type of life you are living with.

 

 

5. EXPECTATIONS

 

Many people after logging in to their social media accounts have a desire from social media to make positive impacts on their lives.

They expect they should be motivating, inspiring, fun, and satisfying so the mood is good and concentration on work increases. In this cycle one wants to feel a thing and when he ends up feeling different things he makes a mistake.

For example, you thought about watching some comedy videos and ended up with videos that do not match the category of comedy.

Expectations might turn out to be mixed with a form of bad habits as you make up for one thing and end down doing another. Doing this couple of times is natural but repetitions might make you feel worse. Something feeling like a better idea at the moment doesn't mean the idea can make it up to you through social media.

  

 

6. JEALOUS FEELINGS

 

When our post does not get enough likes and comments we start feeling sad and depressed. But when we see people commenting on our relatives or friends' posts more than ours we start feeling jealous. We get negative thoughts about our friends who do not comment and like our photo besides not knowing how social media channels work. 

We are not ready to understand the reason why our friend does not like the picture as it was not shown to him at that time duration. We see other posts that have more likes and comments and start judging people because of jealous feelings. We are not in a mood to understand the efforts taken by them to explore their content more than us. 

Watching other people's profile how amazing they are and developing the same for you and indeed other people also desire the same. In this way, the chain of jealously continues along with a large scale of audience.

 

How does this Jeously impact your brain?

 

This starts with craving about the pattern of life you are living and you don't want and need a change in it. This is you are not living for making you happy, but you are living for making your social media dominate more than your happiness.

 

  

7. VALUE YOUR TIME

Social media platforms are a huge entertaining source for many people who have free time. Without even noticing the user social media allows them to spend hours and hours of their time scrolling & searching for different things. 

Many people are awake at night on their bed before sleeping checking notifications on mobile devices that won't allow them to sleep early. Few categories of people only check notifications for 5 minutes but they do it for every single hour. It looks like they are present on social media for a short time but the total makes it all. 

All this time can be spent on work, extra work, or part-time job work that allows you to make some extra cash. This time can also be spent with your family and friends or exercising for weight loss to make a perfect figure. 

Social media distracts and uses the time with the magic of notifications, videos, and banners you like the most. This allows the brain to lose track and get lost besides concentrating on work.

 

 

8. MAKE CHANGES

There are a few important moments and scenes in our life that we all always want to remember like

·         Birthdays

·         Vacation

·         Traveling abroad

·         Hotel Dinners

·         Big steps & success in career

These are things that make positive impacts on our lives so we do not want to forget it at any cost. But many of us are not satisfied with remembering these good moments and need a physical catalog to remember it for all time. 

To make it a collage we capture pictures and record moments through video camera at the moments we start feeling happy. This physical catalog helps us to transport back at the moment to once again feel the glory fun and joy about the happy moment from the old period.

People start publishing these types of posts on social media and there come lots of activities that we think about. People now stop focusing on a happy moment and make a more focus on what pictures make more capable of social media. Few of the omitted photos that people think are not good looking or they do not look good in the picture. 

The emotions are not attached now even if the memory in the photo is worth remembering old moments. People start to analyze how the experience looked because they start looking from the audience's point of view. How the audience will more like the photos, comment on them, and interact more on the posts to make them realize how perfect life is.

Many of us are most engaged on social media to make the audience showing what perfection is and real-life gets lost between.

People try to impress a group of people on the internet by making changes in their personal & professional lives.

If you start making the required changes in your lives you start appreciating how imperfect it can be.

For example:

If you come across a beautiful waterfall, then you might start taking its photographs and publish on social media by applying filters that would make the photo look good.

Instead, you would go to the waterfall take bath, have fun and enjoy the moment itself. You pay very less or no attention to the powerful moments happening around you just because you care for your social media that is not providing any value back.

This makes you stop appreciating moments and fun experiences for what they are. Every moment feels like an opportunity to post on social media.

 

 

So the Bottom Line is:

• Social media increases your dopamine level which in the latter part of life can be a serious problem to achieve it again.
• Social media more the interaction more the account holder becomes happy that is not good for a longer part of the period.
• Social media can easily make and break relationships only because of its more usage.
• Social media can break your motivation to do work with increase jealousness with friends.
• Magic expectations from social media notifications to stay in a good mood are dangerous and a waste of time.