Instagram influencers with their fashion outfits on point, travelling around the world on free sponsorships and collaborations, YouTubers earning millions every month just by making videos of their lives (Vlogs), and freelancers exploiting the use of social media platforms to market their services or deliver to their customers is what bothers us! 

Irrespective of how old or young, financially stable or unstable, successful or on the way to achieve your goals, almost every one of us gets affected by the giant aura that social media platforms have created. 

One of the major concerns with the rising addiction to social media and the internet in general is that it triggers anxiety. Yes, you read that right. 

Anxiety isn’t just related to low marks, or a job at a grocery store or low income anymore. It’s more of an accumulation of how society perceives things and judges each individual. There was a time when having a complete family, taking yearly trips and buying a house together used to be the ultimatum and the true definition of happiness; love and relationships. 

However, with changing times, social media has garnered the trust of billions of people, making them believe that there is another definition of happiness – travelling all around the world, wearing new clothes everyday, going to every exorbitantly priced music festival and what not. Though there’s nothing wrong in this idea as well, it’s just how impactful it is on people, especially their mental health. 

Anxiety, in modern times, is a state of mind where individuals compare their lives to widely popular social media stars and demean their own accomplishments by putting them under a veil of what “trending happiness” means. 

Anxiety can be treated at a root level by identifying what triggers it. It can slowly be pacified into much healthier habits such as:

Eat Healthy

Anxiety impacts your health drastically. It slows your bodily functions, causes light-headedness, forgetfulness, and increases procrastination. And when we slow down our daily life processes, we also create a negative impact on our eating habits. We start relying on easily available, cheap, junk food which is extremely unhealthy and addictive. 

Eventually it is a never ending loop with you procrastinating, eating junk food and maintaining an unhealthy lifestyle which in turn, causes drowsiness and ultimately anxiety and stress. 

You can start with baby steps- include organic food in your diet like Kava tea, fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, leave soda or coke at a time and then fried food like pizza, burgers, fries etc. 

Natural products like Kava tea are widely popular for its calming effects, espeically for people dealing with depression, anxiety and stress. It is quite popular in several countries with thousands of people relying on it for improving their mental health. 

Reward Yourself

Social media has filled in the gaps we earlier used to pass by following our hobbies, doing something productive or even by simply taking rest. It has now become the go-to option whenever we have a free minute on our hands. We get out from our gym, we check into our phones like the world would come crashing down if we didn’t. 

We use Instagram and Facebook every hour like there’s something we’re obliged to check every few minutes or else we’ll lose out on something really big!

Social media has seeded the fear of loosing out in every individual. As much as it is informative, educational and helpful, it has also ruined us in many ways. 

Next time, you reach out for your phone to check your social media account, don’t. Instead, reward yourself with a teenie tiny gift every time you successfully avoid using your phone to check into who went where, who wore what and who ate what. 

The reward can be as little as a healthy snack or simply meditating for a while to calm your mind. If you are into art or creativity, you can draw, paint, start learning photography, write letters or a journal, basically do anything that keeps you at bay from anxiety.