Five Reasons To Take A Social Media Break

Call it a social media vacation, detox or break, whatever you opt for means the same thing. A social media break is you transferring your attention from the social apps to more than what the apps claim to provide. The masterminds behind these social apps have gathered such loyalty from people who believe they are self-reliant on them.

By suddenly basing your state of happiness to the number of likes you get or likewise, you’ve fallen prey. If the words “narcissism”, “loneliness” or “depression” sound familiar, then you understand why you may need a social media break. You need to take time out from your social media-centred life. The average user spends between 40 minutes to an hour a day on social media.

When approximated, that’s more than five years of a lifetime. Imagine losing five years of your life; it’s not a pretty picture. There’s a whole lot you can do with that wasted time. If your time spent on social media is not productive, then you need to try taking a break.

The thought of going cold chicken and deleting the app may scare you, so you can simply try taking a day off, or even a whole weekend. Wondering what you should do during the spare time? Rather than do something dull and torturous like watching paint dry, there’s a whole lot you can do like a leisure activity. Your mind and body would be a whole lot better, and these are six reasons why we believe so.

Five reasons to take a social media break

1. Time is created for real friends

With the increase in social media users comes the increase in loneliness amongst them. People are lonelier than they care to admit. This is because they may have a million followers online. However, when push comes to shove, they have no one who will have their back physically. Taking a sabbatical from social media helps you to focus more on the people around you. You can then build real-time relationships. Don’t lol your way into friendships and actually meet someone you can laugh out loud with.

2. You would stop the comparison game

Whether you like it or not, you can’t help but do this. Every time you pick up your phone and scroll through feeds, you find yourself comparing yourself to others.

You compare yourself with that girl who was so terrible in school. Now she is a millionaire, and it makes you feel like you wasted your time studying. Then you compare yourself to those guys catching a cruise while you’re prepping to go to your white-collar job. Or you may spot some people you follow on social media who are chilling at a classy restaurant while you eat your agege bread and akara. Once you take a break from social media, you would appreciate yourself more.

3. Overcoming FOMO

One of the reasons social media is so addictive is because of the fear of missing out (FOMO). You check online to see what’s happening in the world, or even in your neighbour’s cat’s life. When you take a detox from social media, you can work on your priorities. In no time, you would realise you aren’t missing out on much after all.

4. Becoming more productive

Admit it: when you have a task at hand, you sometimes get carried away checking what’s trending on Twitter. Even if your job has a lot to do with social media, you could get carried away every once in a while. Therefore, you should take a break to focus on all offline task. Cross your t’s and dot your i’s and you would be impressed with your productivity sooner than you think. 40 minutes is a lot of time wasted when on a deadline.

5. Stop participating in social media narcissism

Selfie time! Does this ring a bell? Being self-aware of what people think causes you to try to impress them. You then do your best to feed out the best slay pictures with the caption that would make people like and comment. Whenever they don’t respond as you imagined, it becomes a battle of self-will. You pretend it’s not a big deal, but you still wonder why they didn’t like it. Eventually, you may delete it and post another. It’s simple a circle of the inflated illusion of self-importance.

Spend time offline experiencing things without needing people’s approval. Learn how to see value in the little things rather than waiting for other unknown people you meet online to either value or devalue your worth.

If you enjoyed this post, you can read Seven Easy Ways To Break Up With Your Phone here.