Did quitting social media save my mental health?
I improved myself.
I cannot say that quitting social media improved my mental health altogether. I don’t get to compare my life to the fake life everybody portrays on social media, and that has helped me tremendously.
I’m immersed in my own activities, oblivious to whatever’s going on around me. This has helped me focus on myself more, get my life into order, and work on things that need improvement.
However, the experience hasn’t been completely pleasant. Not using social media seems like estranging myself from the world. It feels like living on some other planet built on Earth. I’ll talk about both the positive and negative outcomes, and you’ll learn that the former outweighs the latter.
The first good thing that happened to me was that I stopped feeling anxious and panicky. Seeing people overachieve or get the best of everything had filled me with hollowness.
If I saw someone posting about their workouts, I thought maybe I wasn’t exercising enough. If I saw people vacationing and shopping, I felt insecure about not being able to afford the same luxury. A glimpse of someone’s relationship would make me wonder why I had never considered doing anything similar.
Each false picture used to be triggering enough to stimulate a negative emotion in me. As a result, I was constantly grappling with anxiety. However, when I stopped using social media, I didn’t get the chance to compare myself to others. All I knew about my friends’ lives is what they told me and what I saw myself. There were no facades.
The second benefit was saving a lot of time. I used to waste so much time scrolling online. That time was now used to do something productive. I started reading in the morning, exercising in the afternoon, cleaning my stuff, etc. The time wasted on social media was now used to do things that needed attention. I found myself having spare time. Procrastination used to be a serious issue, but now I managed to find the zeal and the time to do everything the same day.
Lastly, I became a better version of myself. Social media used to take away all of my attention. Now, I was able to focus on myself. I started paying more attention to my hygiene, physical grooming, and self-care.
I was in the frame of mind needed to look after myself well enough. With physical improvement, my mental health bloomed. But it wasn’t as easy as it founds. No social media meant that I had limited means to communicate with people. I could either call or meet them in person to get updates. Moreover, it became difficult to get news from others. Any local incident or scandal, I used to be the last person to hear about it unless I bothered to read the newspaper or watch television.
Not talking to friends or getting news isn’t that much of an issue if I evaluate the outcomes. Quitting social media has helped me in a lot more ways than it has troubled me.
