Steemit Engagement Challenge / S13W2 - "Protect your Mental Health from Social media Dangers"

Greetings to you friend of this beautiful community and welcome to my blog. It's all bout our health and environment and this week we're on **Protect your Mental Health from Social media Dangers*"

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☑️ What is “social media” in your life, and how many hours a day do you spend on it?

Social media is the means by which I get connected with other people, share information and acquire knowledge. It is also a means for generating income to people through content creation like on steemit, hive, social marketing and other blogging sites.

Social media to me is very important especially with information or knowledge acquisition. It is also a means by which I get some of my job done as part of my work is been done virtually. With is importance I spend close to 8 hours on social media platforms since I have other things to do.

☑️ Name five ways social media can have a negative impact on your life and that of your loved ones.

Social media has so many benefits to me and the society but it also has its flaws which affects our lives very negatively especially when we don't watch our actions. Some of the negative impacts are

• Distraction

A lot of people (including myself) today are distracted by social media in different ways. It is common nowadays to see someone in a very important meeting scrolling through social media handles, watching videos and laughing hence not paying attention to the physical activity. It has even gone bad to the case of people reading and texting on WhatsApp in church. This is so distracting even to the person seated close to you.
These distractions from social media are causing more harm than good to us. We can find people been distracted from their set life goals as they abandon them and focus on social media things.

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• Reduce one-to-one communication

I can say for certain that social media has great reduced people's individual communication pattern. For example I have people whom I used to meet communicate with and had fun together who no longer want that. Rather they focus on social media methods of communication. I have realized a great drod in our communication through this means as the personal bonding has been tampered. This affects individuals, family and society negatively too.

• Increases in cyber criminality

Social media is a good but it has brought forth cyber criminals. They are in the form of hackers, fake business persons and theives. They get into your system, pretend to have a genuine business and extort money from you. These people are mostly youths who have decided not go work or go to school but carryout scamming activities. This is definitely not good for the society.

• Increases societal immorality.
There's no doubt there are educational materials on the internet but also there are irrelevant materials like pornographic movies which people watch. These sites are so open to everyone hence even children get access to them and watch. This yields a negative result to the society as sex has become a normal thing even to children. In the past sex was a sacred thing and not a public thing that people do and post online without shame.

Lack of Privacy

On social media is is difficult to go private personally or professionally as it requires you to input some information about yourself online. This makes it unsafe for you as hackers can easily get access to it if not properly secured. For example when I joined Facebook 12 years ago I inputed my information including my contact number. This gave way to many unknown people contacting me on call and online. This system is not really good as one can't really go private as one posts information or things every day online

• Sleep Loss

Honestly social media can make one loss sleep. Many times I realized I have awake after my normal sleeping as I was online browsing from one social media handle to another. Sometimes I am online till morning. This doesn't only waste my time but affect my health negatively as I will be having serious headaches from.lack of sleep. This doesn't only affect me but many people who over focus on social media stuffs.

☑️ If you had to implement 5 rules to make sure that social media became HEALTHIER in your environment, what would they be?

We all want a better society to live in and so we need to set goals and rules which will improve our lives not destroy them. Some of the rules I will implement are;

• Set social media goals matching your life goals so as not to get into irrelevant things online.

• Post accurate information about yourself so as no to deceive people and also choose what to share online

• Do not engage in illegal businesses or activities of any sort

• Make sure to secure your private information from fraudsters. Install a security settings to your social media handles.

• Map out a time limit for your social media activities and try to respect it.

• In case of any harassment or inappropriate or unauthorized content, make sure to report to the appropriate social media authorities.

CONCLUSION

Social media comes with a lot of benefits helping us in so many ways, getting us connect to our friends, loved ones and business partners. It is also a form of entertainment to many but at what cost? It has its own negative effect which we have to watch against so we can have a healthy life and environment.

I appreciate your efforts going through my post dear friends. I wish to invite @stef1, @ninapenda and @wirngo to participate in the contest.

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