3 Practical Ways to Tackle Social Media Addiction
Social media addiction is a real thing. Everyone knows it but does nothing about it or doesn’t know how to deal with it.
Your conscious mind tell you spending too much time on Facebook is not good but still, you feel helpless.
It’s so funny how social media was just this fun thing, and now it’s this monster that consumes so many millennial lives.
— Cazzie David
Cooperate companies designed social media apps in a way that we keep coming back. Knowingly or unknowingly we allow them to suck our precious time. We can’t eliminate social media from our lives one day because they already made us believe social media is an integral part of life.
Face the truth- you have to stop keep falling into the traps of social media. You need to bring down your cravenness for likes, comments, and silly feeds. Just realize you have a real-life to live out of this virtual world.
Manage your Notifications
You are working on some important work and suddenly you got a notification on the phone that someone commented on your photo on Instagram. Even though the work is very important, you still want to know what’s the comment your friend just made on the photo.
Only after some time you realize one hour already passed scrolling through an infinite amount of photos and you have an important work left to do. Yes, push notifications are real distractions and are the starting point of many infinite scrolls.
Turn off notifications of your social media apps. Then you open these apps only when you need to. If you are using messengers like Whatsapp then notifications should be enabled only for important chats. Don’t let some random forwarded message from your family group to take a toll on your productivity levels.
Uninstall Apps and Use Web Version
The most heard advice to tackle social media addiction is to uninstall social media apps from your smartphone. Here, I am saying you may use mobile web versions after uninstalling the apps. Otherwise, you would reinstall these apps and start again.
Mobile apps are designed such that users get a seamless experience from them. Mobile web versions are not as fast as apps and there may be restrictions on features. For example, unlike the Facebook mobile app, you can’t watch live videos of others from the Facebook mobile website. Using web versions will certainly reduce your spending time on social media.
Most of the social media apps have mobile web versions. When you want to read feeds then just open your phone browser and type the address. Not so smooth experience on web version can reduce down your time-wasting temptations.
Find the Right Substitute
If you are a person who always spends free time on social media then chances are high that you would feel emptiness once you avoided social media. Find some substitute activities such as reading books, journaling or something that create instead of consuming.
The activity you found should align with your interests and use it to replace your social media time. Our lives are too short. Use your time wisely so that you don’t regret it later. You should develop good habits to escape addiction.
Social media escalates our hunger for more feeds and it’s never going to satisfy our real needs. I would never say social media is completely useless. What I wanted to say is take control of your valuable time spend on social media and never allow social media to control you.
