Why are social networks still pulling us in despite being stressful?

If you’ve ever found that you’re looking for a vacation to turn off your smartphone, you may be experiencing techno-stress from social media.

The constant stream of messages,
updates, and content that social networking apps deliver directly to us can sometimes
be like a sense of social overload that encroaches on personal space
and forces us to respond to these messages in order to stay in touch with our friends. You might think that the obvious reaction to this feeling is to give up a cellphone or delete apps.
But a recent study shows that when we face this pressure, many of us go deeper into the space and addictively use our phones.

Traditionally, when people are in a stressful situation,

such as arguing with a person, they relieve themselves of the pressure to get rid of it; they walk, play a little, play with their kids, or do different things. But when it comes to stressful situations using social media, we find that people choose one of two very different coping strategies.

In the study,

researchers looked at five Facebook users from Germany to study how they respond to technology stress. As expected, at times, they tried to stay away from stress by resorting to unrelated activities, but unexpectedly, greater use of social media was more common in these situations.

Social networking apps and websites are what we call “feature-rich technologies.” There are many ways to use them. On Facebook, you can play, read news, plan your vacation by reading travel posts, or talk to your friends.

Each of these tasks runs in a different context of the application and takes you to a different territory within the application. This allows you to view an app in different ways. So if, for example, you get stressed out about a friend posting about animal violence or losing a game in a tech game, you can get away from stress by diverting your attention to a more enjoyable and calming subject.

Social networks have many features to keep us in the space

Such deviations may seem harmless at first,

but they can get you into an endless loop of techno-induced stress from social networks and deviations from social networks; this will keep you in the source of stress. This can even be a symptom of addiction, where you are constantly seeking short-term treatment of what causes long-term problems. The worrying thing is that the more you use social media, the more likely it is to do so.

Concerns about the negative impacts of social media have led governments to take steps to protect citizens. US lawmakers have proposed that banning addictive features such as infinite content and automatic playback of videos on social networks be banned.

social media

Behavior produces harmful effects

Although the purpose of the diverse features of social networking apps

may be to keep people on their feet for longer,

it is also clear that this is how apps are using and how they respond to

social media that can create harmful effects. If people see social networking as a stress reliever as well as a stress reliever, they are more likely to increase its use in response to the pressure the network creates.

The first step in countering this type of reaction is awareness. If we become more aware of our behaviors on social networks, we are more likely to be able to separate the harmful effects from their benign effects and avoid using them in a harmful way.

So the next time you get stressed out on a social networking site, it might be best to put your phone down instead of digging deeper. Otherwise, without realizing it, you might spend minutes and even hours just going from one performance to another to distract yourself from the stressful issues in the same media.

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