Social Media is a relatively new phenomenon in our world as in the last ten years it has completely changed the way we communicate socially with one another. Not only has it allowed us to communicate in some ways more effectively on a day-to-day basis, but it was also changed the way we maintain our relationships and the way we date for the better or worse, depending on how you use it. In this article, we will be focusing on how it has negatively impacted us.
We’ve all done it at one point, with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or some other platform: cyberstalking, obsessive refreshing of the feed, and analyzing statuses or texts are all associated with how we use social media today. This has driven many people insane and has ruined many personal and intimate relationships.
We are all guilty of these actions at one point or another, and these sort of actions always leads to negative behaviors or feelings such as depression or anxiety, which is sometimes completely unwarranted!
Some of you reading right now may be on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter right now monitoring your significant other, crush, or that one girl you had a hookup with last weekend after the bars’s feed, and you may be completely stressing over it! Stop it!
I’ll admit, I’ve done this countless times, especially throughout high school and college, and looking back at it, I see it as a complete waste of time and mental effort! The key is to stop caring and to build relationships in a healthy, offline manner. I’ve stopped using social media for these means for a year now and I feel so much better.
Reading this article will help you end your bad habits, and to being a new journey by building better relationships with people.
Here are some scenarios you’ve probably been in with your favorite popular social media apps:
Snapchat Creeping:
It’s Saturday night, and your friends invited you to go to a nightclub or a bar, but you have to stay in because you have work Sunday morning! Sound familiar? We’ve all probably been there…
So what do you do? You probably still stay up somewhat late, till 11 pm or 12 pm, on your laptop, or on Netflix, while simultaneously refreshing your Snapchat story feed, or watching all the snaps roll in as your friends get more intoxicated throughout the night.
You realize that the cute girl you have a crush on or that you hooked up with once that you now want to get to know better might be with your friends or with some random dudes. You furiously refresh your Snapchat story feed to see if you can catch a glimpse of her…
or
You’re sick on a Friday night, and all your girlfriends are at some house party a couple of miles away. You wish you could wear that new dress you bought at that boutique store in downtown San Francisco, but you’ve been throwing up all night and can’t go out. So what do you do? You go on Snapchat to watch what your friends are doing, trying to live those moments with them while you’re in bed.
You refresh your Snapchat stories and see that one of your best girlfriend’s boyfriend just posted a new story a minute ago. You press his name, and you end up seeing his cute friend dancing with some girl in your English 220 class! “That bitch!” you’re thinking… That boy should be all yours…
You start getting anxious, angry, and butthurt and you start thinking that you should be the one dancing with that cute boy.
You start constantly refreshing your story and feed to see if there are any new updates, hoping to god that you don’t see them hook up with each other…
You overanalyze every little detail of every picture you see or receive and the stress and anxiety start to build. You feel sick again and you head to the bathroom again for the billionth time of the night.
You get tempted to call your friends to tell them to defuse the situation, but you don’t want to seem like a stalker or creep. The anxiety keeps building.
Sound familiar? Why do you put yourself through such nonsense?
The key is to stop such behavior. All this type of stuff only leads to negativity in your social life, and that is something nobody needs! If you can’t stop, you may even have a bigger issue of social media addiction. There will always be another night out, another cute girl or guy you can hook up with, etc.
Instagram Stalking:
Instagram, it’s great for connecting people around the world who are interested in cool photography, but terrible for people who are obsessed with seeing what other people are up to.
You’ve probably heard it before, hearing your guy or girlfriends complaining about a picture someone uploaded of them, or something else going down. Or even, to take it further, monitoring other people’s activity, seeing that your roommate just followed that cute boy that you want to hook up tonight with.
Just think about that scenario for a moment, or any other ridiculous scenario you may have heard of. Is this normal? What happened to a sense of privacy?
People will be people, and they’ll do what they want. The overwhelming feelings of jealousy, anxiety, and anger you may get from stalking someone on Instagram are unhealthy and simply just not normal!
We begin to judge people based on what they post, or even worse, we begin to craft an image of ourselves on social media that really isn’t true to ourselves. What’s the point? To look better in front of your peers or random people who follow you? To get the validation that you desperately crave?
These are all signs of unhealthy social media activity. You simply need to stop caring, and if need be, delete Instagram. It isn’t good for you and will bring you unnecessary drama and stress into your life. We all have bigger and better things to worry about, trust me.
Facebook Paranoia:
You’ve probably been there. You’ve been hooking up with someone, seeing them every weekend, hoping it can become something more. You start spending more time with them, outside of just a hookup here and there, but it’s not ‘official’ yet.
You start getting paranoid and want to start looking through their social media to see if they might be hooking up or talking with someone else. You guys are having a ‘Netflix and chill’ session and she gets up to go to the bathroom. That is when you bolt to her laptop and start reading all her Facebook messages to see if she’s up to anything suspect.
This type of behavior, although very common, is just not what you want in a relationship. If you can’t even express the way you feel and are waiting on something to happen so you can take your hookup buddy to the next step, that is already an issue, but the fact that you can’t already trust her when you guys aren’t officially dating is something else.
Ultimately, the bottom line is to shut off and deactivate your social media if these issues are apparent to you. It will end up creating too many issues that you do not want. Once you get rid of social media, you can focus on other things that will IMPROVE your life.