Social media addiction: The famous management consultant Peter Druker once said “Tell me what you value and i might believe you, but show me your calendar and your bank statement, and i’ll show you what you really value.”
It’s true we might say that we value time, money, healthy food, etc. But we know within 0ur heads the reality. Our major time in a day is spent scrolling down in twitter, instagram, other social media apps or over online shopping websites.
Most of us spend more of our time and attention on social media then we would like to. So, you might here people telling that one should quit social media , but that’s not at all the solution in the world of digital progress where social media plays a major role. But with benefits comes huge drawbacks. As the ex Facebook data scientists Rehana Bucker once said “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click adds.” So, these feed are particularly engineered to be huge time sink but that’s not only the crises of using them. They can also make you a less happy person as shown by the repeated research. By scrolling highlights of people’s life including those who you know in real life, you start comparing your life with them and sometimes subconsciously that puts a damper on your happiness.
So, let’s see how can you use these tools and treat them as tools avoiding it’s drawbacks.
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Kill the notifications:
Notifications on your phone acts like bell in the Pavlov dog’s experiment. Instead of giving food they only let you salivate. They keep you engaged on social media by informing you about people’s posts, comments and dms . There’s nothing wrong in responding to them but they just gives you a drive to respond without any self control and thus forms a habit which is not easy to resist.
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Redesigning your phone’s homepage:
You need to redesign your phone’s home screen to remove all social media apps from it. If you really don’t want to waste your time on social media then take this big step and bury all your social media apps in a folder or create a second page for them. So, if you wanna access them you have to go through these folders which makes it very intentional.
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Switch off the app suggestions to avoid social media addiction
App suggestions works as a huge barrier between you and your desire to achieve something that is coping over social media addiction in this case. So, just go to your phone’s settings and switch off the app suggestions. As these suggestions if not turned off will always remind you to go through those apps you are avoiding at that particular time.
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Try using social media solely on your computer
Have you ever thought what will happen if you use social media only on your computer. Firstly, it will limit your time on social media as computers are not that accessible in comparison to your phone. That always hangs in your pocket. Willingly or not you access it every time it don’t let you control. So, i think only using your computer to access social media and deleting all these apps from your phone works well. In the starting it might become difficult for you to use your computer instead of your phone as the features are very different and less appealing but trust me if you wanna waste less time on social media it’s a really good way.
Try these ways and you will be able to come over your social media addiction and will be able to spend more time with the reality and the real world that you are missing.
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Apoorva Shrivastava
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