Everyone’s been there before. You take a break from homework, reward yourself with a scroll through Instagram, and somehow find yourself an hour later, still going through the explore page. You know you have work to get back to and other things to do, but for some reason you just can’t put down the phone. And I get it, you don’t need another lecture about how “kids these days can’t look up from their screens!” And honestly, I’m one to talk. I check my phone constantly and have a pretty bad habit of getting lost in the social media spiral. But at the beginning of this year, I decided I was going to try and make some small changes that would hopefully have a positive effect on both my mood and my productivity. One of those changes involved making an effort to spend a little less time on my phone.
I all too frequently find myself in the mind numbing loop of Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. The vicious cycle goes something like this: check every new post on one site, move on to the next two, and finally return to the first to see if anything was posted while browsing the others. As you can imagine, it’s truly never ending and honestly just as toxic as it sounds. It’s not that checking Instagram every once in awhile to see your friend’s picture is an issue, the real problem arises when you keep on scrolling afterwards. I obviously can’t speak for everyone, but in my personal experience, I have never scrolled through a Snapchat story and been left feeling better afterwards.
I understand that social media has had countless positive effects on society and it allows us to connect with others in a way we couldn’t before, but it has also progressively become more and more of a fantasy world for us to escape into. Creating a new virtual life isn’t hard, and we often substitute it for working to improve ourselves or for simply accepting and being happy with the fact that real life isn’t flawless.
Obviously social media isn’t real life, but the constant bombardment of content can be damaging in the long term to our self esteem and our emotional and mental health. For myself at least, it’s time to take a break from my phone for a little while. This is one New Year’s resolution that will be tough to keep, as it’s one of my worst habits to pull out my phone and automatically open Instagram. I have a feeling that it’ll be worth it though, and I’m excited to see the ways that looking up from the screen a little can change my day to day life.
Source 1: http://cdn1.theodysseyonline.com/files/2016/01/19/635888220552105589-1740698250_iPhone%20apps.jpg
Source 2: https://www.simplilearn.com/real-impact-social-media-article
Source 3: https://cdn0.tnwcdn.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2015/06/instagram-1200×632.jpg
Cover photo: https://www.dailydot.com/wp-content/uploads/261/9b/4c535ce313ff69012d508f577a1343b9.jpg