Have you ever wondered what damage the excess usage of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others have been doing to you? 

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I myself have been a huge Instagram addict and have accumulated 5k+ followers in the past 2 years on that platform. It gives me a great sense of achievement when I open the app to see 150 likes, 8 comments and 6 follows and then respond to them. Have you ever felt the same?

Why do we feel that?

It has been designed in a way to give a false sense of achievement. When you post, comment and like the contents, it produces dopamine rush in your brain. This is normally released when you do something productive, hug people etc. 

When you get this rush just by scrolling around social media, why would you bother putting efforts to do something creative or productive? You would loose all the motivation to do anything and end up wasting a lot of your precious time on these platforms.

A lot of money goes into research by these companies to find out the ways to keep the users addicted to the platform. They would want to gain this money back and the best way to do it is to keep you engaged for a long time. This will expose you to a lot of ads and they end up making money off of you. 

The damage it does:

Apart from lowering our motivation, it lowers our self-esteem. This happens because we only see the bright side of everyone's life on social media. Nobody wants to portray themselves as sad or unhappy. This ends up giving us a false picture of the reality. 

In reality, everyone goes through the same phase like us. They all experience losses, sadness, happiness, fear and other emotions. But none of them show other emotions apart from happiness. Nobody wants to look like an idiot. That's the main reason for most of us to think that the grass is greener on the other side. We start comparing our lives and end up feeling low. 

It reduces our communication skills. We don't learn how to make friends or start a conversation in real life if we only know how to add someone as our friend on facebook and chat using emojis. This reduces human connection and we would feel awkward to talk in real life. 

It is one of the main factors that waste our time and we gain nothing out of it. It is a bad investment with no returns. Time is limited and its best to make good use of our short time on Earth. 

Using them judiciously or for business purposes is not very bad. I've cut down on my usage of social media and plan on keeping the usage to the minimum possible. I did notice a huge leap in my happiness levels and productivity after I uninstalled all the social media for 1 month. 

I would love to end this post by leaving you with this video by Steve Cutts depicting reality of today's world perfectly:

I hope this post is an eye opener for you. Let me know your opinions in the comment section down below. 

Cheers!

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