Taking a social media sabbatical has given me a healthier perspective already. It’s made me a lot more aware of the time I spent online – sometimes with total strangers – rather than having deeper, more meaningful conversations with my husband and daughter. They’ve both told me more than once in recent years that it seems I care more about Instagram or Facebook than paying attention to them.
In a recent article that looks at social media as a pending public health crisis, founder and president of the Reboot Foundation, Helen Lee Bouygues, writes, “Social media is currently designed for … addiction. People may willingly share their data in exchange for a free service that they value. But they have not agreed to submit to experimental manipulation that encourages slot machine-like behavior and can drive feelings of anxiety and depression. It’s time we started treating social media for what it is: an addictive activity with serious health implications.”
