The Social Media Dilemma! How serious it is and why we should have control over it?

 A well-known poet T. S. Elliot once said a quote which read - "Distracted from distraction by distraction". This quote is quite exaggerating and it will become more evident as you read on this article. How often do we find ourselves reaching out towards our phones to use social media be it Instagram, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter and find ourselves spending hours on it and only to realize it later that we were supposed to complete more important tasks in that same time? Yeah, we have all been through this more often than not and it is very hard to control it. We are going to look into the facts and the reasons why we should start learning to control this urge to move towards social media over and over again. 

What science has to say about this?

       Scientists have a lot to say about the social media addiction amongst the people and especially the younger generation. The reason being the sense of pleasure which one gets while accomplishing something or getting more attention on apps in the form of likes and comments which make them feel good which in turn releases a hormone called dopamine in the body which is also called a feel-good neurotransmitter. This hormone is responsible for your mood, health, attention and even decision making. The blame for any kind of addiction in the human body goes to this hormone and which is something the scientists have to say that the feeling of getting more likes and attention from many people plays an important role in the increasing levels of the same. The increase in this hormone makes us gravitate towards the things which gives us more of the same feeling. This does not mean that we should not use it or get our dopamine levels low, instead, this is a reason we should consider for our betterment and look for ways to find the right balance between our professional lives and social media. Let us look into it in detail.

What is it that we are doing on social media that gives the creators an edge?

        The fact that millions and millions of users are posting pictures and videos while others are liking and appreciating the posts is not a bad thing. The one thing which should bother everyone but isn't is that many people tend to like the same post which they had already liked from a different account. This just kills the base for the new creators to create new content and the people at fault should realize that by liking the same thing again and again, they are proving that they can commit a mistake and have a high possibility of repeating it. They do not learn from their mistakes because the post they liked did not change them in any way. We have to realize that social media is a platform for creators and consumers and we fall into the trap by being foolish enough to repeat the same mistake over and over again. Now whoever reading this should ask yourself whether you are going to choose to learn or repeat it again and again. The most important aspect which is to be observed here is that by repetition of the same reactions, it can be observed that it affects the learning ability of a person and the capacity of reasoning which means you may have to repeat same thing while explaining something to them and that does not look good!

The impact of "scrolling" in our lives

        Okay, we all are guilty of scrolling through many social media apps and most of us love it. What if I tell you right now that it affects us severely especially our grades? Obviously everyone would agree but we cannot stop doing it because we do not know how it is affecting us even though we keep a separate time for that in our time table and manage to keep up with the rest of our productive work. Here's the thing, in our schools, the time assigned for teaching of one particular subject ranges from 40 minutes to one hour. This used to be a fair amount of time when it was introduced long time ago with the people during that time did not have social media and could concentrate for an hour with lesser distractions. Now, you may be wondering how scrolling is related to this, so imagine you are scrolling Instagram and you read a post which was very serious news about a topic. You concentrate on that post for a few seconds, understand it and scroll to another post which is way different than the previous one. This second post maybe a meme which made you laugh and completely diverting you from the serious feeling to finding something funny. Now laughing isn't wrong, but what happens is that you jumped through different emotions in a matter of seconds which affects your ability to focus on one thing for a longer time. When you are technically training your brain to switch between different forms of feeling, how can you expect your brain to concentrate in a class or seminar for an hour? This is the impact which scrolling is having in our lives and we have to learn to manage our time in controlling it.

        It doesn't matter how hard we try, we can't stay away from it and we am quite aware of that. One way we can get a hold on it is by finding reasons more important than it and comprehending with them, which makes it easier for more productive work. We can also not get carried away by appreciating the same thing again and again and make way for new creators with better and helpful content. We should have control over it before it controls us and by which we should know the reasons for using them. Either be a creator or a consumer, but we as the right people should not get carried away and be the flow for the better future of social media and how we intend to handle it. 

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The Obsession With Winning!

      One of the greatest golfers to ever play the game once said, "Winning isn't everything, but wanting it is", a quote which makes me wonder if winning is really that important in life for us or is it just an obsession which people tend to have or develop it overtime with success. Let us look into the facts about the obsession with winning briefly in this blog which will help us understand more about winning and decide whether we really have to focus on winning or do not care about winning to focus on a brighter side. 

How is winning related to success?

      Okay, let me get this straight, how often do we see students who got the best grades in school hover around with zero self esteem? How often do we see the athletes and some achievers disappear after one achievement of success? How often is it that we look at people who are not satisfied with winning even though winning is considered the best possible way of reaching the top. What we should observe is that they all won but they did not succeed. Most of us always focus on winning so much that we often forget the struggle and the journey we went through to reach the top. We may win but with no success. At the same time, we see some college dropouts succeeding in life and the athletes who did not win last year coming back stronger to win this year. This does not mean that we should quit college or just give up on our first attempt. What it really means is that we should focus on what success really means irrespective of the fact that we are winning or losing. Our obsession of winning has been involved in people so much that our society tends to follow a particular route and never is there a chance for self-improvement of the right choices or the freedom for the ones who have the proper idea. We should never confuse success with winning, we can win without success and we can also lose with success.

Why do we really need to win?

     Alright, it is true that we love to win, who doesn't love winning? We play games to win, we argue to win, we tend to fight a case in court to win, we protest to win and convince the superiors for our betterment. We all are always focused on winning in each and everything we do which is for our benefits. Well, it isn't wrong but if you ask everyone in a public protest for the motive of their protest, chances are that you will get answers which are not related to the main topic of protest and they are just there supporting it. This begs the question of why are we doing this? Why do we have to win? The thing is, we always have to prove something to certain amount of people, and it is considered the "best" way to prove yourself is by winning in that particular thing. This obsession makes it so hard for us and we forget why we should really win and how it is affecting our self-consciousness. We work more for the satisfaction of our ego rather than practicing self improvement. The only thing we can get by this is just the proof which is not even meant for you, but for the opposite person. You get absolutely nothing from it except the loss of time and energy. What we can do instead is that we can invest that time in self-growth, establish a connection with yourself, do not care about winning and be the best version of yourself so that the same people come asking you what we really did to succeed.

How do we really plan the route towards success?

      We often see people talk about the path towards success and its aftermath, but have you ever seen someone talking about the path to failure and how to fix the issues if one happens to face those problems? There may be some people but they are very less and that is what differentiates them with the rest of the world in valuating the success and self satisfaction. We have to plan our success in such a way that we take care of all the failures we are bound to encounter in the journey and accordingly, be prepared for it beforehand which helps in making the path very feasible even though it isn't. We can always blame someone else or a situation for our failures but we cannot afford to believe that ourselves which mostly makes you go downhill. Always plan the goals according to your strengths and work on them with sheer passion towards it. You will then realize how much obsessed you were with winning that you weren't aware of the value of your efforts.

Should we fix this obsession of winning or live with it?

       Look, it doesn't matter how hard we try, we cannot change our mindset unless our will power is greater than our self acceptance. We can always strive to win but just winning for a cause with no plan after that can be disintegrating. We can try to better ourselves with each effort being better than the last one. This means that we do not need to fix the obsession, but we have to learn to manage it for the betterment of ourselves and which has some value addition with it. We cannot let the current factors affect it and we can afford to live with this obsession once we get used to our achievements. 

         So, we can conclude that it is always up to us to either win or make efforts to make it to the top of the mountain. We have to stop depending on the factors which won't help us to get to our goals and work on the ones which help us get our goals. Never back down of anything and keep winning with a purpose for yourself.

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The Power of Your Thoughts Affecting Your Environment

       Generally, we come across a lot of thoughts in our mind most of which, as said by a psychologist, is considered to mediate between inner and external stimuli of our whole activities. Now, we never get carried along with the boredom of theories, which makes this blog about the power which our thoughts hold and how they affect our environment and how we interact with everything. We can never control how this works, but there are a lot of ways that we can manipulate these thoughts in our own advantage and do not depend on any source for the same. 

 How do our thoughts work?

       First things first, it is a well-known but hardly arguable fact that we cannot control our thoughts. The thing here is that we may not have the control over what we think or the kind of thoughts we get but we always have the control over how those thoughts originate in our minds which is basically getting to the root of the topic. We always have to instill the pieces of information which we find to take in ourselves to trick our mind into having the thoughts which we require. Lets us look at an example- You are going down the street late at night and notice that a creepy man is looking at you across the street. In this situation, either you walk away with a feeling of discomfort or just treat him as just another guy who happened to see you. Here, there were two kinds of responses, the first one was where you got uncomfortable which would have led to various violent possibilities in which that guy would have done while the second one would lead to a thought of casually surpassing a stranger and nothing to worry about. This is the only differentiating factor in the way of thinking and can go a long way in making our lives better by controlling the power of our thoughts.

The influence of our thoughts based on our situation. 

      We, as social beings, live in an environment full of people and are constantly reminded of the way we should be thinking, which is mostly influenced by the way we are raised or the kind of people we grow up with. What this does is that, it makes most of us think in a certain way which we don't want to and are mostly under constant self doubt. This is where some of us miss all the opportunities we could have got if the people around us were slightly better. Which makes the need of controlling our own thoughts so useful in getting to know ourselves better with oneself and not with the wild judgement of others around us. We should learn to take a moment to process the thoughts according to our advantage before we tend to speak or interact with them when you are under a deep thought process. This is what constitutes the power of our thoughts. 

The thought process and how we deal with them.

      There are a variety of uses of our thoughts based on the situation which we deal in a situation. We tend to say some things based on the environment and the nature of the people around us. This creates the scent of fitting in with the people around us even though we are not supposed to. What this does is that, when we are not around the people and do not fit in, the thoughts which come in our mind are not very ideal and may not be as effectively powerful as they would be if we were in a situation where we feel that we fit in. These things always happen with many people when their thoughts don't match the situation or the people around them in a function or gathering and they end up feeling low. This is not supposed to happen with everyone but if you relate to this, you have to control your thoughts by prioritizing what you are and how to be yourself in a given situation. 

How to gain control and be yourself?

       There are plenty of ways to be yourself in any situation, for example, you can just walk around in the room and find something which may interest you or meet a person who is feeling the same way as you are. But one thing we can't afford to do is let our thoughts have the control over the situation. These thoughts that indicate that we do not fit in are the thoughts which relate very differently compared to the situation we are in that moment and are referred to as distractions. Well, we all have heard it from the teachers back in our school calling us out saying that we are distracted away from the studies and all that and they weren't wrong. They knew that you had no control over the young mind which was always eager to learn. It is okay to be distracted in a given situation but it is not okay to let it control the same situation. We have to keep in mind that we can convert any situation or environment into an area of our own where we can be comfortable with and can make amends to stay positive in every sense. 

         This is how the power of the thoughts which possess influence the environment we are in and tend to make the decisions based on them. We should always hold the power to control our thoughts and make the  decisions accordingly and not based on the people or our surroundings. Always stay positive in the most negative situations and keep improving your lifestyle as you live.

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