THE DARK SIDE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Greetings to you all my wonderful people of hive, hope you all had an amazing day. In this post I would love to share an insight and give my opinion on the topic: "Impact of Social Media on Mental Health".

Everyone at some point or the other have been or utilized the social media for some purpose. All thanks to technology, the world is now in a digital era that even kids could use the social media.

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The Social media is an online platform that allows people to create, share, interact, gain information, learn and communicate with people all round the world. I can still remember when I was a kid, the trending social media at that time was 2go but now we have lots and lots of them ranging from facebook(meta), WhatsApp, twitter(x),Linkedln, instagram, Tiktok, Snapchat and many others.

With the social media one could become useful or end up being useless even with the high rate of technological advancement, it all depends on what you do and how you wish to utilize it. Just like the saying" too much of everything is not good" social media has its own advantages and disadvantages but so many people choose to use it to their disadvantage neglecting the positive aspect of it.

With social media one could learn new things, read books, get information, showcase their talent and skills, earn money, interact with people all round the globe. But in as much as there are several benefits there are negative aspect of it as well and these negative aspects can go a long way to affect our health mentally.

Social media can affect our mental health negatively in the following ways:

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1.COMPARISON AND LOW SELF ESTEEM: The social media most times can most times showcase things that are so unreal, so many people live a very fake life on the social media and so many people without a good self esteem tend to see themselves through the eyes of other people on social media, they always wish to be like them, mimic their lifestyle and show off just like the people on the social media, they tend to compare their selves with others and if there are not able to live like that they end up feeling inferior and inadequate. this act of comparison can affect their mental health so much that they tend to live in the shadow of themselves.

2.ADDICTION TO THE SOCIAL MEDIA: This is another side effect and most people have fallen victims of this very act. A lot of people are so addicted to the social media that they can not stay for a minute without it, they spend more time than they should on the social media and it gradually becomes a habit to them. was once in these category of people, I never allowed my phone to be without being on the social media, I finally discovered that I was drifting away from being valuable to myself, I spent lots of time on the social medial than I ought to, it affected me academically as well till I had to personally discipline myself and now I am no longer the victim.

Addiction to social media can be so bad that if affects our health, when we use our phone quite often, the exposure of ours to the screen of our gadget often than it should affect our eyes, It could disrupt our sleep pattern and most importantly our mental well being.

3: ANXIETY: Just like I said earlier have the ability to make one loose his or her self esteem, the social media can make you depressed most especially if you feel you are not meeting up the standard of people you love and admire. Some years back after my secondary School, that was when I was addicted to the social media, I often see my fellow classmates showcase their luxurious lifestyle and I do feel sad because they were my classmates and yet I was not like them, it seemed they had made it in life already while I was still wallowing in self pity. It made me worry so much, but some years later I got to realize that there were all fake lifestyle. So the social media has a way of making you depressed and that is a negative impact to your health.

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4.CYBERBULLYING: This is very common nowadays, people harass and threaten people on the social media and it is not so good to the mental health of people.

5.FRAUD: Via the social media a lot of people have been scammed, they end up loosing lots of money which will leave them depressed.

These are some few ways the social media could cause harm to our mental health and I implore everyone to try and utilize the social media wisely not to cause anyone harm or share wrong information as it could endanger the lives of thousands of people worldwide. Let us try and discipliner ourselves to avoid addiction and lets ensure to make proper use of the internet for the betterment of our lives and to the world at large.
Thank you for reading through my post.

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