I strongly believe that every person on this planet has extraordinary potential, however is that potential getting held back by one thing? Perhaps an addiction to social media? When I look around me, 99% of all that I see is people burying their faces in their technological devices whether it be their phones, Ipads, computers and ect.. It’s not that I don’t believe the devices that the person is using is necessarily the issue, however more of the social media that people are using now days. Haven’t you noticed that this generation has a lot more anxiety and depression than what people did before technology existed? Coincidence? I think not! American Psychological Association writes, “Two new meta-analytic studies involving thousands of children and college students show that anxiety has increased substantially since the 1950’s. In fact, the studies find that anxiety has increased so much that typical schoolchildren during the 1980’s reported more anxiety than child psychiatric patients did during the 1950’s.” (APA) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. What this says to me is that over the years, the anxiety rate has increased a substantial amount. So much, that a typical child in 1980 has more anxiety than a psychiatric patient! That’s crazy!-No pun intended..
I started making connections in my head and looking around me on a daily bases, and what I began to notice is that people don’t look away from their phones! It’s like pulling teeth trying to spark up a conversation with another person. I even began to notice that the close friends and family that I spoke to on a daily bases would barely glance up from their phones to tell me how their day went. At the time of this breakthrough idea, I was also taking an English class. The teacher had us read a book about how the internet was changing the way our brains work and it mentioned somewhere in the book that a vast majority of people can’t read a book, novel, or, a long passage without checking their phones every few sentences. I even began to realize that I was having the same issue that everyone else seemed to be dealing with as well. While I was reading the book that our teacher assigned to us, I noticed that I caught myself checking Facebook very often while reading, and that is was very hard to concentrate on the passage I was attempting to read in front of me. Therefore, I felt a need to make a change.
That day, I decided to log out of Facebook for a month to see if I noticed any changes in my self. On the first day, I found it very hard to stay off of Facebook and other social media because I would constantly find myself typing in Facebook at the top of the browser, forgetting that I was staying off for a month. After arriving to the log in page of Facebook, I was quickly reminded. I noticed that I, myself, had addictive symptoms being away from social media.It was very difficult the first few days, however after I passed the first week, it became profusely easier to stay off and eventually I forgot that I even liked social media.
However, that wasn’t the coolest part of my experiment. Just after a week of saying Adios! to social media, my attention span became much more focused than before. I was able to read a 450 page book without even feeling the urge to check my phone, I noticed things that I never really put much thought into before such as, how tall trees and buildings really were. Not only that, but my motivation became excessively great, and I noticed that my confidence level spiked because I wasn’t able to run to my phone and bury my face in it whenever I didn’t want to speak with someone. I was forced to have conversations with people that I thought I would never have any interest in but ended up liking them a great amount.
All in all, I was a person with extreme anxiety and found this very useful to help get rid of that. People who get on social media have anxiety due to the fact that on social media there are social norms that everyone tries to live up to on social media such as “who has the cutest relationship(Relationship Goals), “Am I prettier than this person?”, Do I have more likes?” It seems that everyone tries to be better than everyone on social media and that would most definitely give a person anxiety. Not to mention the fact that most people post their problems and things that are bothering them on social media, so when you are constantly scrolling through your feed seeing negativity all the time, it will put a downer on your mood and perhaps cause symptoms of depression. I could say a lot more but I will stop here and hope that this inspires you to take a step back just like I did. Best of luck!
-Katie
Influencing Thought 