25 Ways Social Media Is Ruining Your Life (5 of 5)

Messes Up Sleep Schedule

Remember the blue lights we’ve talked about and how they mess up your sleep cycle? Yeah, they really do. While it does lead to weight gain as mentioned before, the long last effects is a messed up sleep schedule.

What’s worse is the fact that we’re staying up late all because we’re aimlessly scrolling through feeds and absorbing all kinds of garbage. So we wake up the next day, sleep deprived and feeling awful.

Our suggestion is if this happens a lot, don’t beat yourself up about it. Instead change what you do to get to bed. Make a point of shutting off devices past a certain hour. What also helps is placing your phone out of sight or in another room. This removes the temptation to check it during the night.

FOMO

Fear of missing out or FOMO is a technique that many brands have been pushing through various content. In fact, ephemeral content (i.e. Instagram Stories, Snapchat posts, etc.) captures this and pushes it hard.

What this is is that when someone sees a post of someone having fun, they want to be part of it or risk the fear of missing out. It creates feelings of sadness or anxiety and it pushes us to do rash things.

Like pay for a course that we don’t need or will stop using after a while. Or follow some program that we’ll stop using after a few weeks.

Cyberbullying

Bullying is a problem that many of us have to deal with. But now that the internet is around, bullying has also moved online and has caused more problems. The internet emboldens a lot of people and allows them to reveal who they really are with little risk of their identity being put to risk.

It leads to people getting a kick out of trolling people to outright harassing other people.

Decline In Spelling, Grammar And Writing

For some of us, we remember the time in class where we learned how to cursive write. It’s a skill that some of us have ingrained into our head, but has been put at risk for decades now that the Internet is a thing.

But one other thing that’s been on the decline is our spelling and grammar as well. Depending on when you were born, you may have grown up chatting with your friends through instant messaging.

Furthermore, if you spend a lot of your time on the internet, you may find yourself using the shorthanded style to communicate. Instead of typing out words in full, you’ll shorten the word. For example, “you” can become “u” or “for” can become “4”.

It’s convenient and for many it’s cool, but it can lead to improper spelling and grammar structure.

It’s A Huge Waste Of Time

But the biggest thing that social media does to ruin our lives is that it wastes time. The older that we get, the more we realize how valuable our time is and the more we become conscious of what we’re doing with that time.

The sad thing is for many, they can attribute their time to spending time scrolling through news feeds for hours. All for what?

A little bit of gratification and little learning and less time to do what we really want to do. Doesn’t sound all that great.