Social Media - Not A Boon But A Bane For Your Health?

Social media makes you addicted to the constant notifications and the barrage of information that is being constantly sent your way. This results in a tendency or a need to constantly check them, thus shortening your attention span drastically. It is imperative that you slowly start inculcating habits through which you can move away from this addiction.

While this may seem implausible, social media has been shown to affect the appetites of people all around the world, contributing to overeating and to the already existing problems of obesity. This is a result of the food porn trend which is spread all across the social media platforms. Food porn is a term associated with tempting pictures of various delicacies which are put all over the internet and this very slang has been shown to trigger hunger signals within the brain even if you are full. This may result in a tendency to overeat.

The impact of social media addiction has further been amplified by the use of smartphones, as every major social media webpage has also developed into an app. With the advent of smartphones, the number of apps and their intrusiveness with constant notifications has grown rapidly. This has resulted in such habits where you would constantly be checking your phone every five minutes. This creates a dependency or an addiction which results in anxiety and fear when your smartphone is not around. This phobia or disorder has been proposed to be named Nomophobia .

Social media gives people a cover to launch tirades against other people without the fear of retribution. It also promotes cyber bullying which in itself is a big contributor to mental health issues, especially among young adults. Sterilized conversations on social media and the lack of it in the real world, also contribute to irritability, which leads to even more aggression and antisocial behavior.