March 9, 2020 2 min to read
Tips and tricks for overcoming your social media addiction
Category : Health, Hobby
Statistically, people worldwide spend 1.77 hours a day on social media. Young people aged 16 to 24 spend 2.68 hours a day surfing social networks. It represents almost 1,000 hours per year!
The data, although a bit surprising, come from a major pollster called GlobalWebIndex. The company regularly conducts a large-scale international survey on social networks, polling more than 50,000 people aged 16 to 64.
Despite its name (“tele” – “far,” and “phone” – “sound”), our telephone only emits sounds 15% to 20% of the time we use it. That means that the remaining 80% is spent on surfing the Internet.
80% of users consult their cell phones for no less than 15 minutes after waking up! All of this goes to shows how dependent we have grown on these tools and the “information” they contain.
More Reasonable Canadians?
Do Canadians spend a lot of time on social media? It may surprise you, but in Canada, people spend half of their time on social networks.
For example, Argentines, Brazilians, Indonesians, Mexicans, Filipinos, South Africans, Thais, and Turks easily “beat” them.
The frequency with which Canadians surf social media is roughly equivalent to that of France, Germany, and the United States (countries whose economic development is comparable to that of ours).
It is funny, and I would rather believe that the opposite is the case. It is also possible that in some countries, cell phones are used more often than regular ones.
Are We Addicted?
We often talk about “dependence” on social networks. But can we really become “addicted” to it, as we can be, for example, to drugs or gambling?
In fact, yes, and this is not surprising since all these addictions work in much the same way. When you’re addicted, certain regions of your brain (also referred to as centers of pleasure) – are stimulated to secrete dopamine.
That is how we get our daily dose of happiness, so to say. After some time, we get used to it and want to get more. The drugs work the same way, but their effect is more pronounced and long-lasting.
It seems that tweets, Facebook messages we look for have the capacity for making us secrete dopamine. And this, in turn, means we can easily be subject to dependence, the importance of which should not be underestimated.
My Own Addiction
Those who know me also know that for a few years now, I have been using social networks quite heavily. Of course, for me, Facebook is a professional means of communication. And still…
Continue reading the article and learn more about this addiction on Daisy Linden’s blog.