FALCON POWERS – Many of us spend long hours browsing social media sites, and some may even become addicted. Others can fall into the trap of feeling sadness, anxiety, anger, or even envy when seeing the seemingly perfect lives of their friends through their various posts, videos, and photos of their travels, purchases, and beautiful locations they visit.
Some people spend a significant amount of time following these “friends” and watching their videos one by one, which affects their mood and causes them mixed feelings of anger, regret, and frustration. It’s easy for someone to fall into the trap of monitoring people’s possessions and movements, and asking themselves after each video “Why do they have this luxurious life that I don’t have?”
According to the Wall Street Journal, using social media to follow friends’ news and achievements and comparing them to our personal lives can lead to depression.
Internet experts refer to the constant desire to spend more time browsing social media as “passive scrolling,” and they offer some advice to regain control and manage the time users waste browsing the accounts of people they sometimes barely know. Some experts offer a radical solution, which is to permanently delete these applications from the phone, while others believe there are other options to control the use of social media applications if the user does not want to delete them.
Michelle Moheit, a social worker residing in Red Bank, New Jersey, says that “passive scrolling can quickly trap you in the web of comparison and despair.”
Moheit advises the necessity of learning new things using the internet, instead of passive scrolling, such as dedicating time to learning a new skill through YouTube, or searching for more information on a topic of interest, or connecting with people who share the same interests.
Content Organization
Experts recommend that you carefully think about how the accounts you follow affect your mood and thoughts. According to them, you should ask yourself whether the content you see evokes envy within you, or a sense of being lesser than others, and whether you spend your time comparing the idealized images you see to your own life.
Experts point out that most social media applications provide the ability to allow certain topics to appear and block others, without having to unfriend someone, to avoid their content.
