Know what is most important in your life!

Over the past decade, the use of social media has been hard to avoid. Although using social media can be a great way to communicate with different people, share information, ideas, personal messages, stay in touch with friends and family it has some negative effects on our mental health. As we know the younger generation, teens and young adults spend their good amount of time in online socialization and hence are potentially experiencing a greater risk of negative effects on their mental health. The connection between the use of social media and its undesirable outcomes increase anxiety, stress, depression, compulsive behavior, loneliness, and narcissism.

 

People are now using social media every time and this is a very serious problem. People often skip meals or exercise too less. This is problematic as it is known that a healthy diet and regular exercise are keys to good mental health.

A good sleep is very important for good mental health but nowadays teenagers and young adults are damaging their sleep patterns through the overuse of social media. We can estimate that teenagers and adults are getting two-three hours less sleep per night on average than is required, and as a result are more likely to become depressed or perturbed. They often have a fear of missing out on something if they’re not online or feel a need to be constantly available, even they disturbed sleep patterns due to anxiety about missing updates, and some of them are often wake up in the middle of the night by social media alerts.

Loneliness is one of the prime concerns of present virtual society and it is intimately related to serious mental health problems. Uncontrolled, unhygienic and compulsive usage of social media enhances loneliness over time also higher level of social media usage among young generation enhances the emotional loneliness. Social media similarly keeps us in touch with friends, but spending hours every day using social media may substitute the real connection. Using social media apps we temporarily feel some connection to others but when we unplug, the feeling of connection dissipates and increase the loneliness in real life.

We often make social comparisons for many reasons, such as measuring success and failure and we are unknown about how harmless it can be. The main problem emerges when we compare ourselves to unrealistic images or ideas, which is showing on social media. As a result we feel low and self-conscious. Also, social media can set off negative emotions within the users which can lead to depression and social anxiety. While using social media we forget that we are only seeing the aspects of person’s life that they want us to see and that may enhance comparison and negative feelings. This kind of behavior causes jealousy, narcissism and resentment towards other.

The usage of social media and mental health issue is a big problem of the present era. Obviously, using social media has many benefits, but getting on social media when we need an emotional lift is a very bad idea. It can cause the complex connection between social media usage and mental health. Over usage of social media can cause depression, stress, anxiety, online harassment, sexting/texting, loneliness, emotion suppression and lack of concentration and these all things directly and indirectly effects on our mental health.

To reduce these risks we need to take proper steps like information and counseling sessions can be structured.  A proper awareness movement can be organized to understand the effects of usage of social media on mental health on the younger generation.

Are you taking care of your mental health? Please feel free to share.