It may be a bit of a surprise to you when you think about how social media can negatively affect your health. For the majority, social media is something to enjoy and engage in. However, when considering just how long people spend on social media, it makes it less of a surprise.
Whatever you decide to do for long periods of the day, whether it’s exercising, working, driving, it’s likely to have an impact on your health. Similarly, this can happen with social media. What needs to be better understood is whether it can be positive or negative for us. Essentially, it can be both but this article will focus on how it can be negatives and how we can reduce it.
Become addicted
Becoming addicted to social media can be relatively easy when we consider just how much we have our mobile devices on us. We carry our smartphones with us practically everywhere which makes it hard to escape from it. In the long term, it’ll prevent you from engaging with others and effect your mood and how you act in person. This is because of the addiction you have with the platform online.
Affect our emotions
There are many uses for social media including socialising, finding information, escapism and more. The majority of these are pretty normal ways we interact with social media, but there are also other actions that we can have with social media that can cause strong emotions.
One aspect is causing stress and negative emotions. A good example of how this can be caused is through cyber-bullying where it’s easy for bully’s to make hurtful posts and make negative comments about other people through trolling. This stress can be extremely bad for your health.
Impact physical health
The impact social media can have on physical health isn’t necessarily to do with the platform itself, but more to do with the devices we’re using to view them. Constantly looking at our phones can be extremely detrimental to our health.
It can cause strain on our eyes from looking at bright screens for long periods, cause fatigue because we’re staying up late to view our phones and be general distraction.It can also cause us to get a lack of exercise because rather than walk outside we’re choosing to sit in and look at our phones instead.
Fed wrong information
The issue with the internet being widely available to society is that fake news can be fed and shared relatively easily. There are plenty of authoritative and reliable sources online for us to receive information about our health. Instead, we’re being fed it through social media by unrecognised sources which could be risky for our health.
Social media has recently received negative connotations because of the fake images that it can produce which provides unrealistic images of how we wish to look. As a result, many users see this and try to mimic the body image they see online, trying to get breast reduction surgery to get their breasts to a better size, or taking diets that can be harmful for our health.
Keeping ourselves healthy
Although social media has many benefits, we need to be wary about how often we use it. We should limit ourselves to how long we view it, seek professional help if required and consult proper doctors before reading advice online.
