I gave up social media last year after seeing an interview with the amazing Stacey L Tokunaga, a mental health expert who was talking about the dangers of overuse of social media. Everything that she said in the interview really struck a chord with me and at first I began to slowly limit my social media use, and then I decided just to give it up altogether. 

If you feel as though you are spending too much time on the likes of Facebook and Instagram, or any other social media channel for that matter, here are some pretty compelling reasons why you should greatly limit your time on there, or give it up completely. 

Fake

The majority of what you look at on social media is so fake, and this is a big concern. There are people on there who have miserable lives but look like they are loving every second of life, there are some who are with their friends in their photos, but who missed everything their friends said becasue they were glued to their phones, and nobody every posts the truth about themselves or how they are feeling, at least not in the main. This falseness puts great pressure on many of us to be the same, to live up to a standard which has actually been created based on lies. 

Vicious 

There is very little honest and thoughtful discourse online and some of the hate and the vitriol which is stirred up is so unhealthy for people. Most of this is done by trolls which are either people writing nasty things to get a kick, or it could even be fake accounts ran by trollbots, which automatically say nasty and negative things. We have even heard about troll factories in Russia, where people are literally hired to incite hate and division. 

Worrying 

Social media has made the world a smaller place and the risk here is that many of us get chewed up and start to worry about things which are absolutely outside of our control. This happened to me last year when I kept reading about all of the issues in Syria, and the damage that was being caused to so many lives. Whilst this is an awful event and war is never a good thing, beyond supporting charities such as the red cross, and voting for the right political party who may be able to help from my own country, there was absolutely nothing that I personally could do to prevent this happening or to make things better. What happens here though is that it is shared so much on social media that you take on the sadness and the frustration, and carry it with you. There is little point in burdening yourself with something like this, when there is nothing you can do about it. 

These are just a few examples why it is time to limit or totally stop your time on social media, it just isn’t healthy.