Written by: Pratik Dangol - 27009, Grade X
Posted on: 28 May, 2024
In our daily lives, we spend most of it on social media. Everyone does it, from our parents to the young children. We feel like we are having a good time on social media but we do not notice how social media is affecting our mental health.
Social media helps us to get entertainment and make us feel like we are connected to this world and are part of this big community. Moreover social media also helps us relax after a tired day. But there is another dark side of social media too that we don’t realize. Most of the time when we are scrolling through the feed we feel sad unintentionally. That’s because we see traveling, shiny stuff, pictures or posts of others that make us feel like other’s life is so fun/they are lucky but our life is so boring and dull.. But that’s not the reality because users only post the good things and prefer not to show reality. But at times like that we don’t really think of the flip side.
Moreover, according to the research, more than 10% of teenagers get cyberbullied while using social media. That's because many people cannot say the things they want face to face and use social media to do so. Social media has also made people afraid of social interactions. Many people can freely talk to each other online on social media but cannot face each other when they meet in real life which also has a bad effect on mental health.
Social media is also the cause for many people’s depression and stress. Using social media has resulted in many people in a dangerous way. It’s because once we start using social media for us it's like we have to use it all the time and check our social media from time to time which can be called an addiction too. Use of social media is affecting students too as students cannot give proper time to their studies after being involved in social media. In my perspective the social media is affecting mostly small kids as they see many things in social media that they shouldn’t see which affects their mental health and starts behaving like what they see online.
So what can be done to prevent from being impacted by social media and make social media a positive place for us? Simply, we can take breaks when we start to feel like we are being addicted to it. Or we can use it for a limited time for which we can make settings that do not allow us to use them more than a selected time period. We can also unfollow pages or people that share negative things and that might affect our mental health. For young children, parental guidance or parental locks are required to monitor their activities and to ensure that they are not consuming unnecessary content. Lastly, we need to keep reinforcing the idea that all that shines isn’t gold, all that has been presented on social media is generally a facade and we should not compare our lives to it.
