Can Digital Meditation Help You Reach a Better Social Media Balance?
Do you know that probably you spend 6 hours and 42 minutes per day using the internet? This means that in one month we spend 192.6 hours online and in one year 2,343.3 hours.
If you live in the Philippines, Brazil, Thailand, Colombia, Indonesia, South Africa, Argentina, Malaysia, or Mexico you spend more than 8 hours per day using the internet.
Did we do something productive during that time or was it basically lost time?
We live in a world where time is money, we rush to arrive on time to meeting and have crazy schedules to see friends, but what if we realize that we could use our time online in a more productive way? Read and ebook, hear a podcast or meditate.
Digital meditation accessible through apps gives us the opportunity to meditate whenever and wherever, you just need the right motivation to do it, pause everything just for 5–10 minutes, and have a little “Me time”.
Social media users had a growth of +9% from 2018 to 2019, having 3,484 million users last year. Alike the side effect of the intense usage of the internet and social media has grown. What are some of the negative effects that we can experience due to social media?
All these negative effects can be reduced by setting ourselves limits. Identify when we use it for a purpose and when we don’t.
Negative effects of Social Media
It’ addictive
This addiction a constant process of being “connected” to others can generate low self-esteem, it can trigger sadness, sense of loneliness, depression, lose actual human connection, develop feeling jealousy.
Self-esteem
We tend to compare our lives with others, we compare their vacations, their closets, their relationships, or bodies, and all these thoughts can be mentally unhealthy. No one posts their bad days or bad moments on social media, but viewers “believe” these perfect lives that they can have and can generate dissatisfaction and depression. A study conducted by the University of Copenhagen found that many people suffer from “Facebook envy”, with those who abstained from using the popular site reporting that they felt more satisfied with their lives.
Make the reflection whether you worry about the number of likes that you get on your posts?
Human connection
Having more friends on social media does not make you a social person. Of course, it’s an effective tool to connect with friends and be informed all over the globe. But it can also influence you to pause your social interaction with people that are actually around you.
We are so connected to the internet and social media that we have even developed new words that are sharpening our communication, like selfie, photoboom, unfriend, sext, Fomo.
Sleep
How many times has it happened to you that you spend one hour or two on your phone before going to bed and when you try to go to sleep it is impossible? The next day you regret having wasted that time on unuseful ways. The blue light emitted by screens on cell phones, computers, and tablets, plus how close we grab them to our face before trying to go to sleep, restrain the production of melatonin, the hormone that controls your sleep/wake cycle or circadian rhythm. Reducing melatonin makes it harder to fall and stay asleep.
Digital Meditation
Practicing meditation is something that can also help us to be inbalance in our lives. It is a useful way for reconnecting with ourselves and others around us, learn how to live in the moment, and find some peace in between our chaotic lives.
Like other businesses and services now it is possible to meditate with your phone, something that 25 years ago no one could imagine that was possible. Headspace, a meditation application, was officially launched in 2010, with the mission: to improve the health and happiness of the world. One of the founders Alex Puddicombe, a Buddhist monk with 10 years of Tibetan monastic training across Asia, acknowledges the irony that users consume Headspace on a device tied to countless addictions, but also sees technology as an obvious tool and embraces it. Digital meditation can be our answer to create a balance between our “digital life” and our “real life”. “It took a few thousand years for meditation to reach 6 million people outside of Tibet. For Headspace, it only took a few years”.
“A personal meditation guide, right in your pocket.” — Headspace
“Andy Puddicombe is doing for meditation what Jamie Oliver has done for food.”
- The New Your Times
What is meditation?
We can understand meditation with this simple description: “Meditation is both a skill and an experience, a formal exercise to cultivate awareness and compassion”.
“Mindfulness means to be present, at the moment, undistracted. It implies resting the mind in its natural state of awareness, which is free of any bias or judgment.”
― Andy Puddicombe
After spending on averaged 6 hours per day on the internet, having bussy lives, experiencing stress, day to day problems; our brain received an overload of information, digital chatter, and emotions that we don’t every process. People had started to look for a way to find peace of mind, and they can fin it with meditation. “The more we can stay in the present, not bogged down in thoughts or reactivity, the more we are able to take life in stride”.
Meditation Benefits
Meditation has a lot of different benefits, some of the key benefits that can be achieved by meditation and can help to have a balance of your usage of social media are:
- Reducing stress
- Improving sleep
- Increasing focus
- Improving relationships and communication with others
- Improving emotional stability
While the research on mindfulness, especially digital mindfulness programs, is still growing, there is evidence to support the use of mindfulness training for many outcomes. Explore more of the science-based benefits of meditation here.
After reading some of the effects that we and others can suffer as a result of being connected all day long, its relieving to know that we can do some things to decrease the negative effects. Making a reflection on how much worthy time we spend on social media or online can make us realize how much online time we can reduce, we can still do it but preferable being aware and with a purpose, and at the same time, we could use our time for activities that are more productive.
To finish this article I invite you to just take 1 minute to do a very small meditation.
