These Are The 7 Most Important Ways Social Media Changes How You Think

Jul 06, 2018 by apost team

Remember life before social media? It might seem like a strange dream at this point, but there was a time when we weren't constantly scrolling through our phones and looking at photos of friends and strangers. We didn't even know what a "newsfeed" was. Now, we can barely go ten minutes without checking Facebook and Instagram. All this is clearly affecting our mind, but it can be difficult to determine exactly how. This list will help give you a clearer idea of social media's impact on our minds.

Here's some good news: social media can help boost your memory. When looking through social media, we see the same faces and names over and over again. Even if we've only met a person a couple times, we can feel like we know them intimately thanks to social media. So, if you have trouble matching someone's name to their face, you can use social media to help you out.

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When something good happens to you, such as receiving a compliment, the reward center of your brain lights up. Social media is perfect for the reward center, thanks to its use of "likes" to show approval for posts and photos. It can be hard to get off social media, because we want our reward centers to be turned on as much as possible.

Social media can create an inauthentic portrait of what life is supposed to be like. You see people sharing their happiest moments and greatest triumphs and assume that life is supposed to be like that for you. However, life is full of frustrations and setbacks, but hardly anyone is going to post about how much debt they have or problems in their marriage. When we believe social media to be an accurate portrayal of life, our mental health is adversely affected.

Using social media isn't like reading a book or even watching a movie. It can be done absentmindedly. Think of how many times you've opened up Facebook without even intending to do so. Constant social media usage can make it more difficult to concentrate on other activities. Using social media can be a nice distraction, but it shouldn't be what your day revolves around.

How energized you are during the day is connected to how much sleep you got the night before. You might pick up your phone before bed, intending to scroll through social media pages for a few minutes, only to lose an hour of sleep. You might not realize the unfortunate effects right away, but they become more apparent over time.

You're mature enough to know that you shouldn't just blindly follow the crowd. However, social media can have a profound influence on you. If enough people are asserting certain beliefs as fact, you can easily believe them to be true without doing further research.

Do you feel naked without your phone in your pocket? Thanks to the addictive effects of social media, you can feel a strange attachment to technology. For instance, there's the phenomenon of phantom vibrations, where we think our phones are going off in our pocket but they aren't. If you need any clue that you should lay off of social media for at least a bit, this is it.

Social media can certainly be a positive influence on our lives. It can help us connect with old friends and talk about our lives. However, if we're not careful, it can easily take ahold of us. Show this to your friends and see if they agree about the influence of social media on our minds.