Reasons To Cut Back On Facebook

Have you noticed feeling drained after a while of being on facebook consecutively every day? There may be a few reasons for this which would seem obvious to most. Those reasons could be drama, wasting time, addiction to the app, and losing sleep. What if it goes a little deeper than this and what can you do to improve your life?

Losing sleep, outside of looking at a blue screen for hours on end, can also be a response to feeling left out. Facebook's new and ever-changing algorithm is rendering people sleepless on a regular basis due to feeling the need to be updated with everyone's lives. Go back to when the only mode of communication was the landline telephone. You spoke with family and maybe a few good friends regularly during this time. A conversation would last a few hours maximum and you didn't speak with everyone you know daily either. Yet, you were still satisfied with your life the way it was. So, what makes us so nosy that we end up losing sleep over needing to know every detail our friends would allow us to see? There are a few psychological issues that can contribute to this like depression (feeling left out), anxiety (the need to know everything), narcissism (the need to squash people in a made up competition), paranoia (you think people are out to do you in). This is enough to keep one up all night or make a person waste their entire day on the app without actually getting any work done.

Another side of the argument states that facebook is excellent for communication in business. It helps you to stay in the loop and can even evolve a business's productivity. Normally business conversations last about 20 minutes maximum. So why would people spend more than an hour on facebook for business purposes? There may be the unwillingness to collaborate on other apps. The possibility of "needing to be where everyone else is" is still strong mostly in the field of marketing and the creative industries as well. While collaboration is essential, getting things done had become much easier thanks to social media. You meet tons of new people you can create with, recruit, or otherwise become a customer of yours. If this is the case, keeping your communications strictly professional is usually best. Thankfully, facebook allows users to create "sublists" within the friends list to allow you to deligate which communications go out to your professional contacts and which remain with your personal contacts.

This goes back to potentially losing sleep, time wasting, and over-communication addiction. It is wise to deligate your communications throughout a day as it will help you more in the long haul. However, if you find yourself on facebook for over five hours doing this task alone, you may want to hire someone to assist you with your communication after allowing this person to get to know you and your professional conversations you have daily. The only problem with this is people may see you as less than authentic and that may affect your reputation.

Overall, I believe the best way to avoid all aforementioned issues with using facebook is to take a long look at what is and isn't important. Do you really need to share sports statistics with a colleague for fun during every game that is on instead of finishing your own project analysis? Is it necessary to talk for hours about nothing when you could be writing or vlogging about a topic you take interest in? I think what may help a person to cut back on their facebook usage is the inspiration to create content from interests rather than spending hours talking about them for free. What are your thoughts on this? I would love to hear it.