How Social Media Prevents Mindfulness?
Social media gift us a restless mind
In the book “The Essentialism”, Greg Mckeown, stated that,
“To operate at the highest level of contribution requires that you deliberately tune in to what is important in the here and now. The way of the essentialist is to tune into the present.”
What do you think, social media shifts your focus to the present moment or future or nowhere?
It’s been three months since I have left social media. Initially, I didn’t understand how to invest my time without Instagram. I was addicted to using and scrolling through Instagram unnecessarily. So after a restless day, I asked myself, what can I do which will help me productively?
I already have a Quora app, but never used it as regularly as I am doing nowadays. And guess what, I have built good reading skills and increased my knowledge of various other fields. Moreover, now I am writing much better with focus and my mind is peaceful enough to invest time in creating good content daily.
We can’t imagine the world without social media which connects everyone. Especially, in the time of the pandemic, it’s a tool that shows tremendous help in connecting everyone. But, 70 % of people, don’t know, how to use it. People are just using social media for passing their time since they don’t have anything else to do. Whenever they are free, the first thing that comes to their mind is to check the phone. Then, they check every social media app to get all things into them.
People sitting in the airports or waiting halls are much interested in catching news from their phones instead of interacting with people besides them. But, they can chat for long hours. They have more online friends than in reality. It proves one of the famous sayings,
” What you focus on, grows.”
This is how we are building our social skills!!
Effects Inside you
Do you notice things inside your head after being active for long hours on social media? Do you feel energetic and fresh or restless and tired? I think you already know the answer.
Nowadays, People are so restless that they never prefer to leave their minds empty or free of thoughts. Either they have work to complete or they are online. Checking daily what everyone else is doing becomes a part of their life.
Similarly, social media adversely affect your focus power and patience. These two traits are the most important if you want to pursue something big in your life. Without focus, you can’t give your 100 percent to any task. Can you tap your full potential without focus?
When you pursue your goal, you need the perseverance to walk through all ups and downs. Consistently, you need to improve yourself, your crafts, your mindset, and your need to set some realistic goals. All this needs infinite patience to work and rework to improve yourself. Improvement needs the effort to put in whereas if you want to destroy yourself, just sit and relax. Let’s explore in more detail, how social media is impacting our focus and patience.
Focus
When we scroll down from one post to another, we feed our minds with different things instantly. Your mind becomes adaptive to such changing things which are changing continuously and entertaining your mind. But when you sit for work, it doesn’t have multiple things to show you.
It has a draft or rough, soft copy that needs to be developed into creative content or efficient code. This makes you restless. When a person feeds his mind with social media content, he got addicted to such entertaining things and thus starts losing his focus. He considers the work as boring and social media becomes his way of life to have entertainment.
This makes him lose his creativity in his work and thus the quality of work deteriorates.
Patience:
Maintaining patience towards moving your goal is highly important. Most of the people don’t have the patience to work daily towards their goal. They need instant success, instant good result, instantly they want to find hidden talent without being realized, it takes constant practice to build their talent. It’s not just finding it and becoming successful overnight. Therefore, One of the quotes stated that
“ You don’t discover true self- you create it.”
But do they have that much patience to create themselves?
But social media give you instant attention. It makes you shine instantly using some lights, a good camera, and sometimes few dialogues. It makes you feel good. Seeing everybody’s good post wants you to crave success like them and have a luxurious lifestyle like them (Though often, they are just pretending to be rich). Some platforms offer videos one after the other defining different content in all. Do you think they will help you to maintain patience?
When you work towards your goals and fail once, you started feeling- I am not becoming as they are. Am I lacking somewhere? You start comparing your life and feeling bad for yourself. Just see how negative cycle social media builds.
According to Blaise Pascal,
” All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
He is absolutely right because patience is built by sitting quietly and understanding things — -How things are happening around you? Do you have control over them? How to create things for others? How to build a business by understanding customer’s needs?
But when it’s time to sit quietly and contemplate, people are busier in scrolling social media and making their mind restless. So, to inculcate sheer dedication and focus with a handful of patience to pursue infinite things, you must know how social media affects your mind.
My Experience with Social Media
Though I am not using social media much, it doesn’t mean that I am totally inactive. Sometimes when I want to relax, I would like to know what my friends are doing and take updates about them. You know my response to their content increased.
Now I can reply to all the good stories and posts which make me feel good and lively. Now I am not comparing myself to them instead, enjoying what they are doing. One day within two weeks is enough to get all updates around you. You must know how to utilize your time with social media effectively.
Call-To-Action
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