SOCIAL MEDIA DETOX: Does It Actually Improve Wellbeing?-Pt 1
INTRODUCTION
The Social media space is an interesting one and many things happen there on a daily basis. The social media space refers to the vast digital environment where individuals, communities, and organizations interact, share content, and exchange ideas online. Platforms like facebook, Youtube, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and LinkedIn enable users to create and share posts, images, videos, and messages, fostering real-time communication and connection across the globe. Social media has transformed how people engage with each other, consume information, and participate in social, political, and cultural conversations, while also serving as a powerful tool for businesses and influencers to reach wide audiences. In this article, we tend to focus on how social media detox improve our wellbeing.
There is something known as detox which is a process or a period of time when one abstains from a certain thing for example some abstain from alcohol, smoking and taking sweet things just to detoxify their system. For there to be a detox in something there must be a problem or growing concern.
What Do We mean by Social Media Detox?
Social media detox is the voluntary attempt of stopping social media use to improve one’s wellbeing. It refers to a conscious break from using social media platforms for a certain period of time. During a detox, people may log off from their accounts and disengage their followership of other platforms or even delete certain social media apps.
Looking at social media detox from the psychological view point, social media is designed to increase attention span and engagements. Looking at the features such as likes, comments, emojis, etc, the constant top ups of these features in our engagement in social media kind of creates some feedback lobe that targets the reward system and there is this saying that “any behavior that is rewarded has the capacity to reoccur at exponential rate while those who are not rewarded have the capacity to go into extinction”. This can be said to be true because whenever a behavior is rewarded the brain asks for more because rewarding activities help to make the brain to release feel good hormone more and more and this as a way of changing the brain chemistry such that we now have more and more of these chemicals in the brain rewarding circuit. So indirectly social media forces our brain to create more receptors to accommodate the excess chemicals within the brain.
Social Media Addiction
Social media addiction refers to the constant, compulsive and excessive engagement on social media platforms where individuals feel an overwhelming urge to constantly check, engage with, or post on social media, often at the expense of other important activities. There are people who can’t do without being on social media. In fact I have heard someone who once said, “anytime I’m not online, it is like my breath is taking from me, It is as if life is snuffed out of me”. When a person can’t do without engaging on social media such as Instagram, Tiktok, face book, even gaming apps there is a problem. In fact some people view social media as an addiction problem, and this is why we need to know if taking out time of social media spaces can help our wellbeing positively.
Social media addiction can prone you into other kinds of addiction when the social media is no longer satisfying, he may want to find it somewhere else by engaging in drug addiction.
This can lead to a loss of control over time spent online resulting in negative effects on mental health, relationships, productivity, and well-being. Addressing this addiction often requires a conscious effort to set boundaries, reduce screen time, and seek healthier alternatives for social interaction or stress relief.
When this happens over time, the tragedy of addiction is activated because in as much as there will be some occasions one takes a break from social media when will take such breaks our excess brain receptors that are not averagely served by those chemicals that are produced through the brain rewarding cycles that ix interactions with social media, it is at that point that there will be compulsion to go back to social media because the brain will be shouting for more of these chemicals of which the body cannot naturally produce all the volume of that chemicals and when that happens you will know that lack of that moderation with social media will impact our normal daily activities, effectiveness, thereby this kind of subtle problem that is being created by constant engagement on social media necessitates that we detoxify by taking a break.
When someone is attached to social media beyond normal, at times it will be like a light on the dash board pointing to one or two underlining challenge such as depression because people with such disorder tend to withdraw from everyone and find solace in social media engagement. The ripple effect of social media engagement is indirectly maintaining the cycle of depression. When you go on social media you find out that there are many things there that are not ideal and unreal at all, they are not in check with reality, these are distractions in social media and then the social media user begins to compare himself to what he sees there which is known as social comparison which will sometimes lead him to depression. That makes the gap between the person’s real self and ideal self to be so wide because the gap only exits in the persons imagination, but the reality is contrary to what you are assuming, and that assumption will make the person go down into worry state.
To be contd…..
Frederick Abiola-Cudjoe
Frederick Abiola Cudjoe is a blogger, content creator who is in service to Arogi Trauma Care Foundation. He is solution driven and result oriented. He has a strong passion to always make clients have the best customer service experience.
