Social media is one of those things that constantly has the ability to consume us and take up a lot of our time. A lot of social media usage can be innocent; we go on and we scroll. It is an easy way to stay connected with many people we do not have the chance to talk to every day, especially if those people live far away and we do not have a chance to see them very often.
We spend our time looking at all of the things our families and friends are posting on social media platforms, and then we carefully choose the things we post on our social media pages too. It is very easy to get caught up in what everyone else is doing and start to compare our own lives, which is where social media can start to become toxic.
We look at all of the great things someone else is doing, or the fun trips they are taking and we start to feel bad that we aren’t doing those fun things too. Social media is tricky in this way because we start playing the comparison game and compare everything we do in our lives to someone else’s.
Everyone who uses social media has the ability to control what they post and highlight the best moments of their life to show off to the world. Social media can be a great way to keep up with people, as long as it is done in small amounts. But something I have tried to do lately is stay off social media, and Twitter specifically.
I found myself spending so much time just scrolling through things and paying too much attention to the things that did not matter, and I wanted to take a step back. I love having the ability to post things and keep updates for myself on what I was doing at a certain time so I can go back and look at it one day, but I realized how important it is to step away from it, too.
After staying off Twitter, I realized that social media breaks can be very helpful if we want to take them. I found myself not needing to scroll through Twitter before bed anymore and just go right to sleep, or I would read a book instead. A break from social media can be really helpful just in the way we view our world and life everyday.
The less time I spend on social media is less time I am comparing myself or my life to other people. But a social media break does not have to be done completely to be effective or influential. It can be done by spending less time on a specific social media platform, or spending less time in general on any of the social media apps.
It is so easy to get lost in the social media world, but we have the ability to find ourselves again outside of it if we want to.
