Experiment #: The Social Happy Hour
The next experiment I tried was dedicating a specific hour of my day completely for use on social sites. I set up a calendar invitation from 4-5pm: a happy hour at the end of the work day to connect, enjoy, and run across new people and ideas after nearly 12 hours of working or parenting.
Results: Creating a built-in stress relief hour where I know that I can slide into social research and browsing , helped me avoid temptation at other hours of the day. It was easier to replace a bad habit with a better one than to focus all my energy on eliminating the bad habit.
- Strangely, consolidating all of my social media use into a single hour made it seem less exciting. I noticed that Id be finished scrolling within 20 minutes, or 30 minutes on a long day. Theres only so much sustained reading and commenting that I can do.
- I was much more efficient at responding to all of the requests that come my wayrather than have metered out conversations trickling through the day, I buckled down, opened up new browser tabs for each meaningful mention or request, and whipped through it.
- My content creation went way down. Instead, I began to plan ahead with a loose Evernote file for social media status updates and things I wanted to share, and the 12-hour delay between composing and pressing publish gave me a better chance to reflect on whether instant-sharing was really still necessary.
Set Some Ground Rules
You probably noticed companies in cafes or other places, where people are glued to their smartphones screens, sitting at a table with food and drinks. Is the meeting with friends not an excuse to put your phone away and forget about it for a few hours? Try to enjoy conversation with living people, tell each other jokes and different stories here and now.
Make some restrictions for yourself. For instance, always turn off the phones sound if youre in a museum or cinema. When meeting someone, turn off the phone or at least disable Internet access those who need you right now are in front of you. When hanging out with your friends, set a simple rule: those who put their smartphones out of the pocket for no serious reason, pay the bill in the café for others. If someone urgently needs you, theyll call.
So Why Is Breaking The Habit Of Games/social Media Important For Your Son Or Daughter
To give you some resources to combat this, here are some quick tips based on the authors of The Self-Driven Child and my own strategies!
Tip #1: Have a family meeting in which you talk about setting up technology free times or zones. Work on this TOGETHER instead of demanding rigid rules!
Tip #2: Model a healthy use of technology as a parent. If you need to check your phone for a text, e-mail, or alert, ask permission Is it okay if I check this?
Tip #3: Try to have at least thirty minutes of unplugged private time One of my students and parents set a private time every Sundays 9:00 AM to 11:00 am to play board games, play tennis, and/or go out for delicious brunch.
Tip #4: Encourage your teen to write a journal on a daily basis instead. Check-in with their thoughts and feelings instead of responding to friends texts and social media comments. Practice mindfulness.
Tip #5: Utilize the iPhones Screen Time feature. This one button enables you to set your own time limit for EACH app. If you cant control it, someone else needs to do it for you. Its a start!
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Social Media Use Impacts Your Relationships
People with a social media addiction often ignore their in-person relationships in favor of digital interaction. If you have an addiction, you might interrupt conversations to check your phone, withdraw from your family and friends, and experience issues in these relationships related to your social media use. You may also find it difficult to engage in in-person conversations without constantly checking your phone.
Why Simply Quitting Social Media Isn’t Enough
First, it’s important to keep in mind that social media is literally addictive. Just like a drug, it’s designed to trigger reward centers in your brain every time you see a notification on your phone or a like on your latest Instagram post. And this is why the cold-turkey approach sometimes won’t cut it .
“On a deeper level, these social media companies know exactly what they are doing a neurological perspective. What they’re doing is called intermittent reinforcement — it’s what casinos do too with slot machines. And it’s the same with swiping on Tinder or checking your Instagram. The addiction is the reward pathway, it’s a dopamine hit,” Jones said.
Instead of totally quitting your social media, Jones recommends taking smaller steps to mitigate your habits. “I think it’s a problem when people start too big. Start somewhere, where there’s the least resistance,” Jones said. Examples of small steps to help break your addiction include turning off notifications, turning off vibrate, and using a feature on your phone that monitors how much time you spend on social apps.
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Are Your A Social Media Addict
I didnt pay much attention to this unhealthy trend in my life up until recently. I no longer had time for basic things, like cleaning the house or taking out the trash. When trying to figure out the cause of this, I finally noticed my social media addiction. And thats where the problem occurred, and it was quite serious. I couldnt live a single day without checking my accounts.
This problem had to be dealt with as soon as possible. A couple more months and my IQ would probably start dropping cause I didnt get any useful information at all, stuffing my brain with all sorts of rubbish. I went online and started looking for tips to overcome my addiction, trying one tip after another. As a result, I came up with a small list of steps that worked for me. Here they are
Dont Have Your Phone By You Whilst You Sleep
It is not difficult to see how our phones wreak havoc with our sleep schedules. 45% of people choose to scroll through social media instead of sleep.
To combat this, place your phone on the other side of the room. If the phone is out of reach, we will be less tempted to check it. It is often an automatic reaction to reach for your phone and scroll through social media in bed. If you have to get out of bed to enable this, you will think about why you want your phone, and chances are that this will help you cut down on how much you use it at night.
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How Do You Treat A Social Media Addiction
Therapy is one way to treat behavioral addictions like social media.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is a type of therapy that has been used to treat internet addiction. CBT can be offered in an individual or group setting. The key components of CBT include:
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Understanding how a persons thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are related
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Identifying and changing negative thoughts and beliefs
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Teaching coping skills to manage negative feelings
Therapists can adapt CBT to help meet the needs of people addicted to social media. For example, therapy may involve exploring how a persons thoughts and feelings lead to using social media as a way to cope. By changing negative thoughts and learning to cope with negative feelings, the person may reduce their social media use.
People who are addicted to social media may also suffer from other mental health conditions like:
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Anxiety
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Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder
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Obsessive-compulsive disorder
In these cases medications may also be helpful to address the underlying mental health disorder. Depending on the specific symptoms, antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, or other types of medications may be helpful
% Of People Sleep With Or Next To Their Mobile Phone
Social media addiction doesnt just affect behavior during the day it even damages peoples ability to sleep. A study found that 71% of Americans sleep with or next to a mobile device.
Some 47 million people in America do not get enough sleep and 55% more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991. Exposure to screens before bed is a large factor in exacerbating sleep disorders. 35% of people using phones less than average experienced sleep difficulty compared to 42% of those with average or above average phone usage.
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S To Get Over Your Social Media Addiction
Wish you could just put down your phone? Feel like youre addicted? Im so excited to welcome Jennifer Landis to the blog today with tips to destroy your social media addiction.
Social media wasnt a thing 15 years ago, but it has quickly become an integral part of our daily lives. We check our phone for retweets or reblogs as soon as we wake up in the morning, and its the last thing on our minds before we close our eyes at night.
No one wants to call it an addiction, but what else would you call it? Youd say someone who had two or three mimosas in the morning, drank beer all day and hit the hard liquor in the evening was addicted to alcohol, right?
Hi, my name is Jennifer, and Im a reformed social media addict.
The chances are high that you are addicted to social media. Dont worry this doesnt mean you need to book yourself into the nearest rehab program. Theyd probably laugh you out of the building, but thats beside the point.
What can you do to overcome your social media addiction? Here are some steps Ive been working on that might help you, too.
Delete Apps You Don’t Use
A common chorus among experts in The Social Dilemma was to uninstall apps you aren’t using often. Haven’t checked Twitter in months? Take it off your phone. It’ll remove the temptation, the notifications, and the temptation to scroll mindlessly. If you absolutely need to check it, there’s always your laptop.
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Spend More Time With Your Friends And Family
Use the real world to connect with your friends and family rather than through a screen. Go on trips with them or plan some casual night outs. You can even stay in for a pizza and movie kind of night, or play some fun board games. If not either of these, have a fun chit-chat session with them, catching up on all lifes happenings. And leave all phones out of your plans. Chances are you wont even have to attend to calls because the people who usually call you are right in front of you.
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Negative Impact Of Smartphone Dependency On The Societal Or Group Level
Harder to research and substantially prove is the positive or negative effect of digital technology usage on the societal level.
What we can say is that these technologies have most probably facilitated the further political polarization in many societies worldwide, and the proliferation of fake news. Connected to these are the use of digital technology for unethical persuasion in the political and business arenas.
Its also reasonable to say that social media and Big Tech in general have played a role in the incitement of violence and even ethnic cleansing in the case of the Rohingya in Myanmar and other cases. Watch the above video for more insights.
Finally, the way that technological capabilities and the ownership of tech companies are distributed across the world, exacerbates already rising levels of inequality across and within societies.
All of these can logically be expected to exacerbate the negative effects on the individual levels, much rather than soften them.
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Make Plans With Friends And Family
Make it a point to schedule in person time with friends and family during the week. Whenever you spend time with your social network in person, challenge yourself to turn off your phone or keep it on silent, so that youre not tempted to check social media while youre with them in person. When youre doing something fun with others, it can be tempting to want to post about it on social media in real time. Instead, ask the friends or family members youre with to take photos, then have them send the photos to you after you part ways. This will allow you to be present in the moment something that can go a long way in healing a social media addiction.
Its Okay To Put Your Phone Down And Enjoy Life
In fact, this one very simple point could truly help you cut that social media addiction! Precious moments of your life are one in a millionlike seeing a shooting star or catching the smile of your favorite person. These moments are so fragile, and they never happen the same way twice in your lifetime.
Dont run towards your phone to capture that moment. Capture it instead with your eyes and with your heart. Let it become a sweet memory. Enjoy the moment youre so keen on sharing with others and instead, prioritize sharing it with yourself.
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Keep Electronics Out Of Your Bedroom
This is good advice regardless of whether or not youre trying to curb your social media addiction, since blue light from electronic screens can suppress melatonin, the hormone our body makes in order to put us to sleep. Keep your phone, laptop and tablet in a separate room where you sleep. This will help improve any sleep issues you may be having as a result of social media addiction, and can help you get better sleep overall.
How To Break Social Media Addiction
In 2018, people with internet access worldwide spent an average of 144 minutes on social media every day. Yet research indicates that limiting social media use to 30 minutes a day is optimal for mental health.
Abstinence is often recommended for treating drug or alcohol addiction, but for social media addiction, the ideal psychological outcome is controlled use of the internet. It’s not necessary to give up social media entirely, but it is important to have strategies for setting limits.
Lin Sternlicht, a licensed mental health counselor at Family Addiction Specialist, recommends that people who are concerned about social media addiction take the following steps:
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How Teen Social Media Addiction Is Treated
Social media addiction treatment requires time spent away from social media and online media in general as well as a focus on helping teens deal with the repercussions of their addiction, face the potential causes for their addictive behavior, and identify methods that might help them better limit their social media use, and continue a healthier relationship with online media.
Talk Therapy One-on-one psychotherapy with a professional may help teens dissociate from their behavior and realize the damage it has been doing to them and others. Theres an argument to be made that teens live with different concepts of communication and interaction thanks to the internet, but research has shown that excessive online media use leads to severe negative mental health impacts. By understanding the damage that has been done and why it was done in the first place teens can move on to find ways to balance their online media with life.
Family Therapy Sometimes, it helps to work not only with a teen, but with their family as well. A group therapy session can help the rest of the family better understand what the teen is going through, as well as identify methods to help them.
Implementing changes throughout the whole family can also help the teen better deal with their problem and encourage healthier use of online media throughout the household.
Social Media Addiction: How To Protect Yourself
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In the early days of social media, checking in on your friends and loved ones through social platforms required you
In the early days of social media, checking in on your friends and loved ones through social platforms required you to physically log on to a computer. With only a few platforms available, it was easy to limit the use of social media, using it to stay connected and update others on your personal and professional life, then logging off and stepping away without much of a second thought.
Today, social media use looks much different than it did just a few decades ago. Thanks to evolving technology, we can now access our social media accounts from anywhere. And with so many social media sites and platforms to subscribe to, were spending more time than ever inside our mental pod, something akin to The Matrix.
The result? An estimated 210 million people in the U.S. are suffering from social media addiction. However, many experts speculate that this number has increased exponentially since COVID-19. Social media became the obvious answer for how to stay connected when cut off from friends and loved ones. But spending too much time on social media has proven to have negative benefits when it comes to our mental health as a result.
In this article, well explore the signs of social media addiction, how to tell if youre addicted to social media and steps to take in order to limit social media use, and use social media in a healthy way.
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