Social Media and Its Impact on Youth Mental Health and Communication

Since emerging in the early 2000s, social media has exploded in popular platforms to give friends, family, and even complete strangers the ability to easily communicate. Finding the right balance of social media use is all about how we use it. there have been tons of studies done about social media and its impact, one showed that the use of social media can impact on our mental health, especially for young generation.

Most of teenagers nowadays have several accounts of social media for their daily life such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Whatsapp. Those kind of platforms have become immensely popular among teenagers. Frequent use of these sites causes an adverse effect on the mental health of the young generations. For example lack of sleep. 

Due to lack of sleep teens become more aggressive, irritable and suffer from lack of concentration which leads to poor academic performance. Moreover, social media has become an addiction. Like other addiction behaviour brain responds to social media with release of dopamine which gives them a sense of reward. 

Teens become overly concerned about their social media accounts and tend to log on uncontrollably leaving behind important tasks. Hence, this addiction of social networking sites can not only damage mental wellbeing of teens but can also affect their future.

The addiction of social networking also has great impact on teens physical health, as teens spend most of their time on various social platforms, they don't do any kind of physical activities such as playing outdoor games, running and exercise. Due of lack of physical activity young generations are vulnerable to various heart diseases, several cancers and most common obesity.

Social media has enabled communication to be effective and efficient, but it also has negative implications associated with social communication and social skills of youth. It is affecting relationship and degrades the quality of interpersonal communication. Young generations are spending much time on social media which cause physical isolation and a lack of face-to-face communication. 

As most of the interaction takes place online teens feel less nervous while talking and sharing ideas online. Also, they tend to spend time less time with their friends in person, due to which they lack social and communication skills. 

For teens communication skills are not only important for daily interactions but also plays a significant role for success in their future careers. Besides decreasing the amount of face to face interaction, social networking usages also reduce the quality of their social interaction. 

As teens prefer to stay online most of the time, they are not able to spend quality time with their friends and family. This leads to poor communication between their loved ones which not only damage the essence of their relationship but may also destroy it.

As technology is growing social media has become an imperative part of our society. Social media has proved to have both positive and negative impact on youth. 

However, social networking sites have a negative effect on teens mental health as frequent use of these sites causes mental disorders such depression, anxiety and sleep deprivation. Although social media has enhanced our connectivity, it is also causing a decline in social and communication skills. 

Due to excess use of social networking sites the quality of relationships has dramatically declined. Further, cyberbullying has also emerged as negative effect on social media which has increased rapidly in the past few years causing mental distress among teens.