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How much time would you say you spend on social media each day, and are you satisfied with that amount? For many, social media has become a double-edged sword. While it can allow us to stay in contact with people who live far away and keep up with the day to day lives of our closest circle, it also has the potential for some significant drawbacks. Social media can be incredibly time-consuming and even addictive. It can emphasize comparison with others, leading us to feel bad about our own lives. You can take charge of your social networking use and shape it to be an experience that works for you. Read on to discover how social media can kill your productivity and happiness and what you can do about it.

Social Media and Productivity

Social media can be a real killer of productivity, particularly if you’re taking frequent breaks to check in or if you spend long amounts of time perusing your feed and reading the articles you click. This time spent on Facebook, Instagram, and the like is keeping you from your more pressing tasks related to work and personal objectives. In addition, lots of distractions makes it difficult to fully concentrate on things that require your attention, so you’re more apt to take longer to get into the groove of a task or to make careless errors due to these distractions. Unfortunately, your brain is wired to seek new experiences, so you can be quite prone to the cycle of social media use, making it hard to control how much time you spend on it.

Social Media and Happiness

Social media lets you see what your friends and family are up to on a regular basis. It also allows you to share key points of your own life. The intention is that these platforms facilitate and build connections. You would think they’d make us happier, right? Unfortunately, that’s often not the case. Sometimes our social media engagement can seem hollow or inauthentic. You may not get the sense of warmth and closeness you would from real-life encounters. In addition, we’re often left with feeling inadequate when we see all the wonderful trips, milestones, and accomplishments of our online networks. What’s easy to forget is that most people post only the highlight reel of their lives; we’re not seeing what goes on behind the scenes.

Steps to Take

For various reasons, social media can negatively affect our productivity and our happiness. You can take steps to minimize those effects and to make your experience online one that is more fulfilling. When it comes to productivity, consider enforcing strict time limits on yourself. Put social media use on your schedule and only check in during those periods. Use an app that restricts your use if you find it too tempting to handle on your own. You’ll soon start to feel less of an urgency to check in on your feed, and you’ll gain control of your productivity levels. Regarding happiness, keep in mind that people’s lives can be very different than they seem. Try to look at things more realistically and to view your own life through a lens of gratitude. In addition, you might want to consider unfollowing people whose posts constantly cause you to feel unhappy. A more extreme, but sometimes useful, option is to take a social media fast in which you go cold turkey and don’t use it for a certain amount of time. This can rejuvenate you for when you’re ready to return.

Social media isn’t all bad. Using it wisely is what matters when it comes to whether you enjoy your experience with it. Take charge of your social media use, and you’ll also be taking back your productivity and happiness.