I know we all sound like a broken record, but if you listen and read any of my articles this one needs to be the one you choose. Whether you like it or not, I’m about to throw some real truths at you. Some truths about social media and what it does to us without us even realizing it. Social media can consume our lives and impact many aspects of our identity if we’re not careful. I’m writing this because I have just realized how negatively it has impacted me, so I’m speaking from experience.

Social media really became popular around the time I reached middle school and ever since then, it has grown and grown to great multitudes. Social media has done so many great things for the world, don’t get me wrong. We can communicate with people who live far away, catch up on other’s lives, and even rekindle friendships with long-lost friends. All of this is so cool and fascinating, but it wasn’t until a couple months ago that I really realized what it was doing to me.

A couple months ago, I was going through a really hard time. It was a hard semester and I was so busy I barely had any time to myself. Like many of us, I would always check my social media outlets before I went to bed and when I woke up. I eventually got so busy and exhausted that I started running out of time to even do my short daily check-ins.

After I started getting too busy to be on social media 24/7, something crazy happened, I became a lot less stressed and a lot happier. It wasn’t until a couple weeks went by that my schedule started to calm down a little and I picked up my daily routine of scrolling through my timeline again.

I didn’t feel as happy and became more stressed in the next couple days, and then it hit me. I am taking time out of my life to look at other people’s. No wonder I was so unhappy, the more I looked at other people’s lives, the more I felt like mine was superior.

We spend hours and hours on end looking at how great everyone’s life seems to look in a picture, tweet, or post, when a majority of the time, things are not as peachy or perfect as they seem. Not really sure why it took me that long to realize this fact because I’m a perfect example. My posts are all pretty, cute, and fun, but what my distant followers don’t know is, I’m still a human and I’m a hot mess a good majority of the time.

Now, there is nothing wrong with enjoying social media, because it can be fun and positive. We just really need to start limiting ourselves. Whenever our worth and quality of life starts to go down because our expectations don’t meet an app’s, we are living life all wrong.

Take my advice, the more you enjoy life around you, rather than the 2-D lives glowing in front of you, the happier you’re going to be. Your life is so great and unique, go live it and stop comparing.