Impact of Social Media Addiction – Along with the development of the internet, social networks are present to meet the needs of the community to interact with each other in cyberspace. You can chat with people who live far away in other countries only through social media applications. With social media, you can also find old friends, make new friends, and more, but don’t use it wrong. Social media will give you exciting experiences. All of this is definitely fun, especially for those of you who like to interact with many people.
Nowadays, most people access social media through smartphones. Social media provides convenience in terms of connecting between people, and also means that social media will always be accessible anytime, anywhere. This hyper-connectivity around the clock can trigger impulse control issues, constant alerts and notifications that can affect your concentration and focus, interfere with sleep, and make you a slave to your phone.
People in the age range of 18-25 years usually use social media to get the latest information on things that are going viral, make new friends, or just to strengthen friendships. Unfortunately, some of them are trapped in low self-esteem after using social media.
This is evidenced by research which states that about 88% of people will compare their lives with other people’s lives that appear on social media. This can make them feel inferior and think negatively about themselves.
This way of thinking is also known to increase a person’s risk for experiencing duck syndrome or unhealthy thought patterns, such as toxic positivity.
Another study also showed that teenagers who frequently accessed social media more than 2 hours per day were more at risk of developing psychological disorders, ranging from anxiety disorders to depression. If this is allowed to drag on it can be dangerous for mental health. Because in the end you will depend on many aspects of yourself to judge through pseudo social media and easily changeable. Here are some of the negative impacts of social media that you need to be aware of and prevent early on.
The Bad Impact of Using Excessive Social Media
1. Acute Sleep Disorder
Accessing social media while relaxing is common. But for people who are addicted, every time they never escape from the gadget to see their social media accounts. Maybe 24 hours of time is up for playing social media, and it ends up disturbing sleep.
These habits will certainly have a negative impact on health because they have experienced acute sleep disorders. If you have this, you can sleep less, and the impact will affect your studies, work, and others
2. Excessive Fatigue and Difficulty Concentration
Lack of hours of sleep or even poor quality sleep can clearly interfere with health. Another effect, the level of concentration becomes low and causes excessive fatigue, the body is not fit, and is often sleepy when carrying out daily routines
3. Higher Stress Levels and Unstable Emotions
When a person lacks sleep and sleep hours become irregular, then that person can easily experience stress. Does it affect activity? Of course yes. Productivity is disrupted, even though there are work responsibilities or other things that must be completed.
This condition can be exacerbated by high work pressure, and even other personal problems that are quite heavy. Finally, it causes an unstable level of emotion and tends to change.
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4. Eye Disorders
Too long and often accessing social media can have a bad effect on the sense of sight or eyes. Playing social media on gadgets while lying down, for example, will make your eyes tired quickly, and diseases that can damage your eyes will arise
5. So Ignorant of the Environment and People Around
As the saying “social media keeps the close,” it’s true. Sometimes we see, one family is eating at the dining table, children are busy playing social media, mother and father are the same. In the end, they didn’t chat with each other, because everyone was busy with their cellphones and social media.
Social media addiction can worsen a person’s attitude to the surrounding environment, even to those closest to him, such as family and friends. It is as if the world belongs to oneself, so people who are addicted to social media tend to be indifferent to their surroundings.
6. Excessive Depression and Anxiety
Through social media, someone will show their side of life. Being sad, happy, or what they were doing at the time, all of them were exposed. Expressions like this can be both positive and negative that turn into stress. Various conditions seen and found on social media can cause depression, anxiety, anxiety, especially for people who are already addicted.
7. Always Feel Less
The first negative impact of social media is the emergence of a feeling that yourself or your life is always lacking when compared to the lives or lives of others on social media. Although you may now be well aware that the uploads that are scattered on social media are mostly the result of manipulation, there will still be feelings of insecurity from within. You may feel that you are not beautiful enough, stylish enough, or not enjoying life enough based on what other people show you.
8. Addictive Effect
The sixth negative impact of social media can have an addictive effect. Despite some researchers’ arguments that Twitter may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, social media addiction is still not included in the latest diagnostic manuals for mental health disorders.
However, social media is changing faster than scientists can keep up, so various groups are trying to study the compulsive behaviors associated with its use. For example, scientists from the Netherlands have invented their own scale to identify possible social media addiction.
If social media addiction did exist, it would be a type of internet addiction. Daria Kuss and Mark Griffiths of the University of Nottingham Trent in the UK have analyzed 43 studies on the subject, and concluded that social media addiction is a mental health problem that “may” require professional treatment. They found that excessive use of social media was associated with relationship problems, poorer academic performance and less participation in offline communities.
It was also found that those who are more prone to social media addiction are people who are dependent on alcohol, extroverts, and social media users who use it to compensate for the few bonds or social interactions they have in real life.