Social Media Scheduling-A Teenager's Priority
SCHEDULING THE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Believe me, this small thing can help you buy a lot of time, health and happiness.
My post is targeted towards Millenials. I myself am a millennial and I know the urge you have to open your phones once in a while to check someone’s status updates or to share a meme with your friend, or to see what others are doing but dude pause for a minute. Have you ever kept a check on how much time in a day you use your so-called Apps? Obviously much more than you would like to.
It might be shocking to hear but on average a teen spends around 3 hours only on social media. This excludes all other mobile applications that you use throughout the day. So don’t even bother about your total on-screen time, I am speaking about social media only. That counts to around 1.5 months of your year spent on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, etc.
You follow your urges so much knowingly or unknowingly that you end up complaining about not having time for a lot of things which might help you to be happy. Moreover, it also has been established that social media addicts are more prone to hypertension, depression, anxiety attacks and other numerous problems that arise due to lack of physical activity in your daily routine.
Let’s have a look at your patterns of social media usage.
The people whom you follow in these apps can be broadly categorized into 4 categories.
CAT 1 -The Influencers
This category includes celebrities, your heroes, your favorite sportspersons, people who give you information, your favorite products, and companies. They are the ones who throw at you a lot of advertisements, publicize their products. Their main motive is commercial though they also want to increase, influence and maintain their fanbase. Getting exposed to new products and happenings around the world is quite harmless and absolutely necessary in today's world.
CAT 2-The Known Ones
Includes your friends, families, and relatives whom you know in person and they know you too. These are the group from which we reap the true benefits of social media. People we care about, in whom we invest our emotions and somehow are separated by distance get connected together through this medium. Sharing pics, talking with them, is the reason why we use these apps in the first place.
CAT 3-The Entertainment
Almost all of us follow our favorite pages from which we get our daily entertainment. It can be meme pages, comedy channels, shayari pages, movie pages, etc. Although entertainment is nothing wrong but, if your only purpose of using social media is to get entertainment and you cannot stop yourself relentlessly scrolling down your meme feeds then this is more of a harm than relaxation.
CAT 4- THE MAJORITY
There are reasons why I wrote this category in caps on. One reason, pretty straight forward they account for the majority of posts you get in your feed and they are the largest in number among the categories. The second reason, these are the people more or less responsible for your constant urge to open your apps every now and then.
Who are they? People hailing from your school, university, city, locality, etc. but you never got to know them personally in real life. You know them only because of your mutual social media connection. There is nothing wrong with making new friends and sharing your ideas with a larger crowd and also listening to ideas from different people. But this seldom happens, most of the time what you consume from them is useless information. It’s not that you want to know what they are eating today, what they are wearing today, where they are today, what jokes they like and a lot of other useless information but alas, in the end, you end up consuming all these information throughout the whole day. The greatest trap is that as this category is numerically large and their updates get compounded so efficiently that every time you open your social media you get to see something new. This category gives you new information around the day, pushing out notifications and hence making you habituated to check your account every now and then.
This expectation of getting something new every time is what makes you a social media addict. Scientific proof of this addiction, each time you use these apps your body produces dopamine, the same hormone that is produced when someone consumes alcohol, drugs or smokes. This addiction hormone then wants you to go back to the same place to scroll through your feed and check if something new in the quest for temporary pleasure.
So is stopping to use these apps for once and for all the solution to this problem?NO! You will never want to miss the benefits of CAT 1, CAT 2, controlled CAT 3 usage and sharing and listening to ideas from the large CAT 4 crowd.
So what is the solution?
Build upon and maintain a simple habit, schedule your social media use. Restrict yourself to check your feeds around particular periods around a day not more than 3–4 times, and for atmost 10–15 minutes each time. Also spreading out these sessions all through the day will ensure you won’t miss anything important.
Why is this helpful?
Think of a day when your schedule is full of classes, work, assignments, etc. You spend very little time on social media on this day. But on your idle days, you find yourself scrolling through apps all throughout the day. The thing is that on busy days your brain somehow narrows down and schedules out all unplanned actions, in between your busy schedule. Your mind does not think using social media as some mandatory chore that needs to be done necessarily. But on idle days the monster hunts back again. On your idle days when the brain is not able to schedule out our unplanned actions, if we build on this habit, we treat social media just another work to be done at a pre-planned time. So ultimately your social media gets restricted to a limited time on a day, and simultaneously you have got rid of the addiction and have a lot of extra time.
Just think of how you could invest that extra time to learn something new, or to pursue your hobbies, or to work out, or to spend it with your loved ones or to just help someone, how happy and satisfied you ultimately would be.
Peace!
Sibasis Nayak
Footnotes
Nice content bro
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