Social media: Addiction vs Dependency
How would you feel if today you couldn’t check your social profiles? Would you be sad? Angry? Depressed? Or maybe relieved? Happy? Would you keep going on with your life as if nothing happened?
Social media addiction is an expression used to identify someone who spends a lot of time using platforms or apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and others so that this usage interferes with other aspects of the person’s life. But is it really an addiction? Technically no. There is no medical recognition of it being categorised as a disease or disorder. But how can we tell when a habit turns into dependency or worse into addiction? Can we really define those boundaries? And if yes, who has the authority to do it?

The World Health Organization (WHO) rules a decision over the version of the International Classification of Diseases (IDC). For example, in May 2019, the member states of the WHO have accepted the IDC-11 with the introduction of gaming disorder. The latter is defined as “a pattern of gaming behaviour characterized by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences”. Moreover, to consider the behaviour as a disorder it must have been evident for at least 12 months.
According to the Finnish Association for Mental Health, a person suffering from Internet addiction feels a compulsory need to spend time in discussion forums, chats or sex sites, for example. Furthermore, the addiction can present itself in many ways, such as checking your emails compulsively and may not be so much about the Internet itself, but the possibilities to experience suspense or anonymous pleasure, for example.
Given these examples, how can we tell how much social media is too much? There are several possibilities including online tests, friends’ or relatives’ opinion, self-reflection. According to statistics reported on telegraph.co.uk website, the average person checks his/her phone 200 times a day and one in four people spend more time online than they do asleep. Can you relate to these numbers?
While the goal of certified addiction is usually the complete removal of the behaviour, for the social media dependence the aim would be to find a balance for its usage. In many environments, e.g. the work one, the employ of social media is almost necessary. Let’s say you just opened your own hairdresser shop and you want to promote it. If you don’t create at least Instagram and Facebook profiles and post on them regularly, most probably it’ll take you much longer to create a good clientele than if you do.
So how can we find the balance?
One popular option is to go into a ‘digital (or social media) detox’. It consists in a list of steps that help you quit or suspend for a limited amount of time the use of digital devices or social media apps. There are different kinds of detox lists, but they all have some core common points, such as finding a way to make the smartphone less appealing (like turn off push notifications, put it on airplane mode or just put the phone away), giving a daily allowance, make some rules (like no phone in bed or during meals), make one or small changes at time and find someone to share the detox with. Some of these key points are very similar to the ones suggested when quitting a bad habit or an addiction, they just need to be customized for digital dependency. An example of a practical checklist can be found here: https://images.app.goo.gl/KMbRR7LpLzuvNEFo8.
Another option is represented by self-help literature about how to manage your social media consumption, how to learn the ‘healthy’ way to handle it and how to improve your life and find the balance with the use of digital devices, such as smartphones, and social apps on them.
Furthermore, we can find apps that help reducing time online or just on the device. There are apps like Forest that help you stay focused, having some sort of block on certain apps on the device, or other kinds of apps that completely block your phone, like Flipd, or even those that just allow you to track your app consumption, in order to become more aware of how much time you spend on your device and on what.
The last option is to look over the internet for blog posts, Youtube videos or other sorts of information that can help with the problem. This one is a generic and wide alternative to disconnect, being actually connected, so it could be good as an introduction, before choosing one of the other options to truly beat the dependency.
And you, how much are you dependent? Find out here with a simple test and increase your awareness! https://psychcentral.com/quizzes/internet-addiction-quiz/
Written by Sara Cabodi and inspired by a presentation at Aalto University by Minna Saariketo.
References:
https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-social-networking-addiction-2655246
https://www.who.int/features/qa/gaming-disorder/en/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/better/technology/9-ways-to-start-and-stick-to-a-digital-detox/

