Social Media – Addiction To Depression

Being present on Social media is need of the hour for everyone in today’s life. If you’re not, you’re looked down or considered as sort of orthodox or outdated. But let us see the ill effects of social media because of excess usage.

1. Fake or Momentary Happiness : Everyone is posting happy, encouraging post or status, which indirectly starts the competition, of showing to the world of only a few hundred or thousand people that we are happier than them. So we fake many a times by posting pics of only momentary happiness. Whereas, we could be more concerned about creating or finding real gems to fill our lives with happiness, joy and love.

2. Factor of Jealousy : What is clearly visible at social media is that everyone around is celebrating and living a happening life full of happiness, love & joy, whereas, we feel, that our life is not as exciting or happening like others have (or actually pretend to be at times). It creates a factor of unwanted jealousy unknowingly, which being a negative emotion, has its own ill effects on health and well-being.

3. Wrong Comparison : At the same time, we are knowingly ignorant of the fact that we have just been present to the the few moments of hundreds or thousands of people, but we are comparing our own one whole life with them, which is wrong comparison. Let’s compare one life with one life and then decide, who is happier. Obviously, if we analyze, many things in our own life shall be far, far better as compared to anyone around.

4. The More We Know, Clearer We Are, That Lesser We Know : When we come closer to the people, posting so many good status or pics, by meeting them again & again or try to explore their lifestyle, we come to know that their life is also as challenging as ours or may be, many a times, more than ours. And they have been putting much more efforts and also failing, more number of times, to keep their success rate high.

5. Inferiority Complex : Actually, people around are also facing problems but share only good things that how happening their life is, just to pretend that they are happy so that they are not looked down by the friends and colleagues. They do it just to look good in the community and to overcome the inferiority complex created somewhere deep down in the subconscious mind.

6. Absent Mindedness : As written in the book “The Monk Who sold His Ferrari” by Robin Sharma, “Thousands of good & creative thoughts cross our mind during the day“, but we are not able to capture, hold and work on the ideas, because indirectly our focus is on social media making us absent minded in what we are doing. Being present 100% in what we are doing, makes us much more efficient and productive.

7. Multi-tasking is a Myth : Human mind is not trained to focus on multiple tasks at one time i.e. Multi-tasking. It can focus on one task only at one time. It’s rightly said Focus Goes, Energy Flows, Results Follow. Social media is a deterrent to focus and deviates us from being productive in our work or job. It only looks like that we can mange work and social media presence at parallel time, which is, in reality, not possible.

8. Overspending Just For Selfies : To counterpart the jealousy, created by looking at friends going places, enjoying or buying amenities/accessories, we also tend to go places and overspend just for fun or taking a selfie, to be posted on social media live or later. It makes us spend out of our pocket or budget at times, keeping us under debt just to show off, which is never a good habit to be followed.

9. Symptoms of Depression : To avoid the jealousy factor, we prefer spending more and more time alone, keeping us more and more in our head all the time. We start thinking more and more, but act less and lesser day by day, making us lethargic and inactive leading us towards depression. We avoid socialising, because of the constraint of budget or because of deep rooted inferiority complex created, deep down the subconscious mind.

10. Excess of Everything is Bad : It’s not about being against social media, it’s just about being aware about the ill effects or side effects of excessive usage of social media or being online all the time. If used creatively for learning or networking, benefits of social media are also worth it. Excess of anything makes us addicted to it, thereby making us lesser efficient or productive during the day.

 
 
 
Sushil Arora
Management Consultant