3 Tips to Help Overcome Your Social Media Addiction
While social media helps people connect to each other via the internet in real-time, it has an addictive nature. When you’re addicted to social media, other areas of your life may suffer, including school, work, and even relationships with the people right next to you. In fact, research has been released on the Social Media Disorder Scale, which is as close as it comes to an actual diagnosis for mental disorders. If social media seems to be playing an ever-increasingly important role in your life, you should try and quit. The good news is that this is one of the addictions that are easier to fight, and here are three tips that can help you do this and regain control of your life.
1. Limit Your Use of Social Media
Even though overcoming an addiction to social media is one of the easier things to do, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have its hardship. To make it easier to manage your addiction, consider limiting the time that you spend on social media rather than stopping its use entirely. This way, you can still enjoy the benefits of social media and also regain control over your life.
This is a great way to improve your overall safety, including safety while driving. It’s well-known that social media addiction can have real-time implications on driver safety. This has led to outcomes such as having 39 states, including Tennessee and Kentucky introduce laws that prohibit texting while you drive.
2. Look for a New Hobby
To make it more effective for you to spend less time on social media, it’s a great idea for you to find a hobby that’s going to occupy some of the time that you spend on social media. For this hobby to be an actual solution, it’s best to look for one that doesn’t involve using your phone or technology. This way, you can still fill your time doing something that you enjoy and realize that social media is not the only way for you to lighten up your life.
This doesn’t have to be hard for you to do even if you work in a technology-based field. This line of work is likely to see you come across facts such as that 72% of marketers around the world say that the most effective SEO tactic is creating relevant content. With practice, you’ll see that there’s enough time each day to work, scroll your social media feeds, and unplug.
3. Interact More with the People Around You
As mentioned, the main idea behind social media was to make it easier for people to get in touch with distant friends and family. With an addiction to social media, you may do more of that but lock out the people who are physically close to you. You can remedy this by making an effort to interact more with your friends and family while you’re at home or in other social settings.
This is easy enough to do if you make the effort because even in a setting with a few people, there’s likely to be one or two with whom you can have a conversation. For example, the average private school has about 166 students, according to U.S. News. Even in such a setting, you can find one or two other students with interests that are similar to yours.
These three tips could make it possible for you to start fighting your addiction to social media. If you manage to do it, you’ll realize that the physical relationships that you have with the people around you can be just as fulfilling, or even more so than those you form on the internet. Put your phone down and give the world around you a chance, after all, the one on the internet may quite possibly be there forever.
