It's the time of year where everyone feels like their heads are going to explode from stress due to school, work, life, holidays, you name it, someone is probably stressing over it. On top of all the real life stressors, a big one I've come to see as a stressor is social media.
I'll admit it. I'm always on social media. My future revolves around social media, wanting to know what's happening, wanting to know what the latest news is, or even how stupid Donald Trump is acting on Twitter on that day. But with constantly being on social media, it's exposed me to how toxic it truly is.
I don't know about you, but I have seen things on social media that make me question, "Who even thought about posting this?" or "Who takes the time to think this would be good or okay to post?" I think it simply comes down to the attention seeking aspect of wanting 'clout' on social media. It's becoming a huge problem, and just making social media more and more negative on your mental health.
With finals and midterms and just school taking over my life, I saw my grades plummeting. I didn't really care about how I was performing in school; The classes I've been taking this semester don't pertain to my major/minor and I felt like it wasn't really necessary for me to even try? I ended up dropping a class after I found out three weeks in that I didn't need it for my major. I am taking classes I took in high school but didn't get the high school credit for, so I thought, "Why even make the effort to get good grades?"
I felt like a social media cleanse was necessary. I felt like if I just limited my time on social media, my grades would start to improve.
I was wrong.
I tried it for about a week, limiting my time and seeing how that would effect my academic performance, how it would affect my social skills, see if I could actually start caring about how I was doing in school.
It didn't do shit. My career involves social media heavily. I'm wanting to go into sports broadcasting and communications and nowadays it's either on radio or on social media where you're finding the news or reporting new findings about the sports industry.
Trying to take my mind off of social media was much more of a challenge than I thought it would be. It's not that I think that I'm "obsessed" with social media, but my best friends live across the country for me, so that's my only form of communication. It was hard for me to try and even cut off communication from them, that wouldn't have been fair to them.
So when people say they're trying to take a social media cleanse and they come back "refreshed", are they really? Because it seems to me that it just stressed me out more than social media did when I was active on it. Social media is toxic, and we just need to find a solution that'll help us in the long run when it comes to our mental health.
