When to Take a Break from Social Media

Social media is a part of everyone’s everyday lives now. There’s nothing quite as modern as flipping back and forth between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, trying to keep up with all of your various newsfeeds.

Sometimes, however, social media takes too big a bite out of your free time or starts eating away at your mental health. It helps to know when to take a break from social media.

When to Take a Break from Social Media

Free Time

This might sound a little heavy, but you’re probably wasting a ton of time on social media. Your free time is limited: why piddle it all away on some dumb phone app? Surely your hobbies are more interesting than looking at pictures of people you went to school with years ago.

Take back your free time by stepping away from social media. There are way more fun things out there than scrolling infinitely through yet another news feed. Painting, dancing, singing, watching movies, reading, going for walks in the park, playing board games with friends, the list goes on and on. Just step away from the phone.

Mental Health

There’s a clinically-proven link between spending a lot of time on social media and depression. Low self-esteem, feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness, and even pervasive nihilism are all connected to over-consumption of social media. This is all because of the way social media hijacks your brain’s rewards systems.

Your brain gets a hit of feel-good chemicals when your content is liked or shared. This is a very addictive process, and it can be very difficult to decouple it from social media use. The best thing to do when you’re spending too much time on a social media app is to just delete it outright and spend more time with your friends in the real world.

Arguments

We’d be lying if we said we’ve never been in social media arguments. Thanks to the current divisive political climate and the spread of constant misinformation, arguments are bound to happen on social media. We’ve even had relationships with family soured over regrettable Facebook exchanges. This is really, really unhealthy.

If you’re finding yourself getting into arguments online and getting really stressed out by your own social media account, cut social media out of your life. Just uninstall the apps from your phone and live your life without sweating the social media. It’s more fun to just live in the moment, anyway.