Social media was enabled by the digital revolution and rapid increase in mobile technology from netbooks to tablets, to smartphones and smartwatches. Social media users enjoy all apps such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp and a whole lot more. It is estimated there will be 2.67 billion social network users by 2018. The more alarming statistic is that 14 % of our time is spent on these pages. It means that some of us might spend more than 4 hours per day on these pages, getting seriously addicted to social media and having the fear of missing out.

Here are the social media addiction facts and dangers:

• When you spend more time connecting to the social pages, you are actually spending less time for yourself, your family and your friends.
• When you are addicted, you miss out a lot on your real life. While you have a vacation, instead of enjoying every moment of it, you only focus on taking nice pictures and share it with other people online.
• You gradually lose your ability to focus. In addition, become aggressive even more easily when you cannot get access to your social media pages just for 5 or 10 minutes.
• Scientists have proven that being online on these pages lead to negative feelings such as lonely, bored and even anxious, depressed and self-doubted.

Spending All Your Free Time on Facebook

How much time is too much time? Any longer than two hours in a row or three hours daily on Facebook could be a sign that you have become addicted.

Do you compulsively log in to make status updates? While it is normal to want to let your followers know what major events are happening in your life, you may want to rethink logging in to let them know where you are eating every lunch!

A sign that strongly indicates you are addicted to social media is that you lose time. Do the minutes turn into hours and you find yourself immersed in your newsfeed? You may be addicted.

Whether you are trawling your Facebook news feed, uploading a photo on Instagram, or posting a tweet, you find there is no shortage of ways to waste time on social media.

Students admit most of the time they are procrastinating, but sites like Twitter and Facebook also allow them to keep up with what is happening.

Their compulsion is spurred on by the rush of excitement she gets when people “like” their posts or when others mention in their updates.

Social media addiction’ has been recognized as an official condition in the UK, with London clinics treating hundreds of sufferers a year.

It follows a study from the University of Chicago that found social media can be more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol.

The research found social media features such as ‘retweets’ and “likes” give users a boost of feel-good brain chemicals, while a lack of endorsement can provoke anger and anxiety.

How to fight this addiction?

Here are some of the most effective things you can do to prevent and deal with social media addiction:

1. Disable Alerts

Get used to quickly jump to your page when there is a new notification appearing on the phone’s screen. The worse thing here is that people do not only check for the notification, 2 minutes later, they often find themselves wondering around. Therefore, the first thing to get rid of the addiction is to disable the push notification of these social networking apps. This would remind you less of the app every now and then.

2. Focus

You do not need to know what happens to everyone on Earth. Therefore, you should unfollow most of the social media page of celebrities. Choose to follow only a few of them only. Furthermore, you can sort out the list of your Facebook into smaller groups such as friends, family, colleagues and total strangers so that you can check updates from the groups that really matter to you only.

3. Set a timer

First, set the amount of time you would use for checking your social media pages daily. You should think about the time when you log on your social media pages as well. If you cannot resist the urge of checking these pages every 5 minutes, divide your time.

Then when you go on these pages, start a timer. When the time runs out, you should log out. It would need a lot of determination to prevent yourself from staying for a few more minutes but you soon will realize how much time you have for doing other things else.

It is really good if you can buy an alarm clock for the timer. Reducing your reliance on your phone is one step to beat social media addiction.

4. Check with purpose

Before you go on your Facebook page, ask yourself if you have any specific positive reason such as replying to a message or finding a contact from your old friend.

Social media is an integral part of our lives, it helps overcoming geographic distances and sharing knowledge around the world. Nevertheless, some companies have been exploiting its entertaining features for their own profit, they commercialize our lives, enjoy to see us wasting our time, so I am here to help.

Lastly, although we can easily connect with anyone around the world, we face difficulties while talking face-to-face with the important ones. Let us think about it, let us disconnect to stay connected in real life with real relationships.