How much time a day do you think you spend on social media? The daily average time teens and young adults spend on social media is up to 9 hours a day! That’s 63 hours a week and a total of 3285 hours a year!!
Out of these 9 hours, how much of it is beneficial to us, how much of it is intellectual and how much of that actually makes us happy? Sure we laugh and giggle at the inside joke of a meme and we feel good about ourselves when we get just over 100 likes on a recent selfie but how much is this effecting our mental health?
Scientifically, social media is affecting our sleep, memory and attention span. Mentally, social media is affecting our self-esteem, human connection and mental health.
I am completely guilty of spending too much time on my phone looking through Instagram and Facebook but the sad irony of ‘SOCIAL’ media is that I get shamefully unsociable.
On a survey taken by 1479 young people aged 14-24 who suffer with depression and anxiety, most popular to score was social media apps in being the main reason as why they suffer. But why?? Our goals in life now are to aspire to be an Instagram model and a lifestyle or fashion blogger. Constantly aiming for over 10k followers – we don’t post pictures of who we actually are; we post pictures of who we want to be and what type of life we want to have.
We don’t like the idea of being successful anymore, we like the idea of looking successful.
We get jealous and envious of people who seem like they have a perfect and beautiful life but why on earth would someone post the bad and ugly of their life? It’s all about capturing those good angles for the perfect pictures.
Social media of course does have its benefits, but to spend 9 hours a day sat scrolling through your phone, comparing yourself to someone you don’t even know is painful. There are 8760 hours in a year and just less than half of that we spend on our phones. Let’s put down our phones and start becoming someone. You can’t change the world if you’re watching how someone else is doing it.
Brilliantly done you ickle star! Talk we must!! 😍
A brilliant and effective article, thank you for sharing. More people need to understand the negative effects social media can have.