Social Media: New Years Resolutions and Self-Regulation

January is when social media feeds get filled with everyone’s resolutions for the year to come. They’re pretty much the same old goals as they always have been and the likelihood is many will fail. After all if they’re to work, resolutions must be for life not just for new years.

Before you ask, I’m not a grouch when it comes to resolutions. I’m all for self-improvement. I’m just against having a specific time frame for them. If you need to change something in your life, why wait? Failure of new year’s resolutions is not only accepted but expected – hardly encouraging you to keep yours going.

One of the resolutions becoming more common in recent years concerns social media. I’ve already seen articles about giving up Twitter or Facebook in 2017, with a couple of friends stating the same. My sister went more radical, deciding to turn off her phone every day at 8pm to avoid the inevitable drain Facebook had on her time.

Of course that one was destined to fail: turns out phones are needed for things other than social media. It is the best example I have, however, for not giving up but scaling back. Sure you could eat less chocolate, but give it up altogether (forever) is a ridiculous goal. Yet so many people opt for cold turkey, because in the end self-regulation seems a lot harder.

We all know if you give a kid some cake, they’ll eat it and want more. If you let them, they’ll eat it until they’re vomiting rainbow sprinkles and balled up with stomach cramps. As an adult, the want doesn’t necessarily diminish, but we know it would be bad for us. We regulate ourselves (usually) because that’s what adults do. It stop

The problem with social media is it never really came with a health warning until it was a little too late. Texts, likes, retweets all give us dopamine hits: a neurochemical reward that makes things addictive. Just as with any other addiction, self-regulation quickly goes out the window. Not only that, but it somehow does away with other self controls. We say stuff we shouldn’t, we do stuff that’s idiotic and encourage irresponsibility across the board. It’s much easier to make mistakes in an instantaneous world that’s always watching.

Just look at Trump. He’s the poster boy for cutting back on Twitter in 2017. He doesn’t have an ounce of self-regulation and it shows. White House advisers desperately need to explain the concept to Trump over the coming years if he’s to avoid impeachment. People have lost jobs, friends, supporters and dignity all because they couldn’t regulate like they would in the real world.

Now technology isn’t like smoking – you can’t just give it up without major repercussions. Too much of the world stage is online now and cutting yourself off is an impossible minefield. But we can look at how much we use it and do our best to cut back. The links between social media and very bad things are countless. It leads to depression, anxiety, insecurity, cyberbullying, security leaks, insomnia… the list, like a Facebook newsfeed, is endless.

Obviously not all of us experience these, but we’re certainly familiar with the hours wasted on it. We’re a world of ‘I-just-don’t-have-timers’ yet we manage to fit in an average  two hours of social media every day. All of which brings us nicely back to those new year’s resolutions. If you cut your social media use in half, what would you find to fill that extra hour every day? All those things you should do – cooking healthier foods, exercising, learning a language, spending time with family – all those things you want to do, are there ready and waiting in the wings. I swapped Facebook for foreign languages and I know which gives me the longer lasting buzz.

It’s time to take back control and find yourselves a healthier dopamine hit. You never know, you might do something really worth tweeting about.

 

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