TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Social media has transformed into one of society’s significant commodity, which is proven by the record stating that 62 percent of Indonesians have a habit of spending their daily average time on social media for 4 hours.

This has helped the massive spread of information that contributes to the trend known as FOMO (fear of missing out). Two out of three people would deliberately partake in certain trending activities to not feel left out.

Unfortunately, this trend causes several negative effects for general society’s mental health as Emotional Healing & Mindfulness Expert Adjie Santosoputro argues social media surfing is indeed addictive.

“Sociologically, social media has its benefits but it also drives modern people who are already indulged in a state of distraction, to be more easily distracted,” said Adjie Santosoputro on Tuesday in a press conference entitled ‘Wealth Wisdom 2019: Mindfully Wealthy in 21st Century.’

According to Adjie, this state of mind can lead a person to be apathetic and aggressive along with other symptoms of social media addiction; having a short fuse and overly sensitive. He reminds people who experience those symptoms to do social media detoxification.

He then explained a number of ways a person can detoxify themselves from the social media platform, which is by being mindful to limit social media usage. Another alternative is to gradually erase the social media accounts across a number of platforms a person has.

“Erase the accounts one by one. Do it gradually, if done otherwise, it would be similar to a yoyo diet where a person will eventually be addicted again to social media,” said Adjie.

Other ways he mentioned that would help a person let go of his or her addiction to social media is through daily brief meditation.

TEMPO.CO