Social media, by its nature, is addictive.
Scrolling through posts on Instagram, TikTok and any other platform drains a lot of time. However, in the long run, it’s extremely damaging for your mind and body.
As an artist (or a person who wants to achieve something great in life), DoomScrolling must be avoided.
Here are 11 reasons why.
1. Anxiety and Stress: Constantly being bombarded with useless and overall negative information can permanently increase your anxiety and stress levels. This is the reason why most people today are more fearful about things than they were a few decades ago.
2. Chronic Depression: negative content and seeing others having a life that apparently is great and fun contribute to increasing your feelings of sadness and loneliness. Over time, this escalates into chronic depression. This is also why, nowadays, most art is sad, depressive and unremarkable.
3. Lack of Sleep: Doomscrolling before bed interferes with sleep quality. Your brain needs to stay away from monitors for at least 2 hours before going to bed; otherwise, you interfere with your natural biorhythms.
4. Reduced Productivity and Focus: Jumping back and forth between working and doomscrolling will reduce your productivity and focus. It takes time to fully concentrate on one task, but if you don’t give your brain time enough to get into deep focus, you’ll never be as excellent in your art as you can be.
5. Damaged Relationships: real-life relationships take time and attention. Spending your time with your face glued to a screen is only going to create an invisible wall between you and your loved ones, creating a deep sense of loneliness. And, like with depression and anxiety, loneliness pushes you to create art that is negative and depressing.
6. Lower Self-Esteem: DoomScrolling forces your brain to compare yourself to others. And since on social media most people fake their happiness and their success, you are going to compare yourself to unrealistic standards that don’t reflect reality.
7. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out): Doomscrolling intensifies FOMO, as you may feel like you’re constantly missing out on important events. With FOMO you are going to prioritize quick fixes of enjoyment instead of investing time and discipline into creating your next work of art.
8. Burnout: Excessive stress and anxiety, combined with the lack of productivity and real-life achievements, will lead to mental and emotional burnout.
9. Reduced Creativity: Constantly consuming other people’s creations is going to confuse you and reduce your creative abilities. And that will make your art more superficial and predictable.
10. Addiction: Social media is addictive because it creates constant dopamine spikes, making it difficult to break the habit. Like every addiction, it can be eliminated, but it takes time and discipline.
11. Keeps you in a consumer mindset: an artist must be first and foremost a producer. Someone who puts time, energy and passion into creating something beautiful for the world to enjoy. To do so, you must spend at least 80% of your time creating, while less than 20% of it consuming other people’s creations. This is a habit that takes time to be created. But it’s the only difference between those who achieve something in life and those who stagnate in their life.