Challenge! Break Your Social Media Addiction!

Hey Fonzies!!! Wait, what brings you here? Have you completed your assignments? Are you well-prepared for your presentations and progressive checks? Perhaps you feel guilty spending too long hours on social media and that is why you are here. You may want to make a change but do not know where to start. Taking a break from your study by updating yourself with the latest posts on your one and only Fonz website is acceptable. Kudos for your efforts! However, if you are over-engaging with social media but procrastinating about things that you should work on, I am sorry to tell you that you have fallen into social media addiction! Have you ever tracked the screen time you spend on social media daily? If so, how long is it usually? Remember to comment on your screen time below and let’s see who the social media expert in SFP is! Nevertheless, I am here to break your record. Challenge here!!! Can you pull yourself away from social media addiction and start concentrating on necessary things? No worries. I will be in the challenge with you. Are you ready? Let’s get started!

1. Don’t use your phone! Use an alarm clock!

It is not a secret anymore. The first thing that we do after we wake up is to take a glance at our phone once we turn off our phone’s alarms. Instead of shortly glancing over new messages arriving, we indirectly spend more than 10 minutes or even up to 1 hour just to reply to messages as well as scroll through Tik Tok, Instagram, and YouTube for no purpose. Time is ticking away when we spend prolonged hours on social media. I suggest you stop using your phone as an alarm reminder every morning. Instead, try to use a traditional alarm clock to wake you up! Keep your phone as far away from your bed as you can, somewhere you are NOT able to reach easily every morning. Once you switch to using the alarm clock, your finger will not get to swipe and open your Instagram or WhatsApp subsequently. Thus, you have adequate time to get well-prepared for your morning classes as you are not wasting time on social media.

2. Turn off notification ringtone and floating display for unimportant apps.

I am sure that you have downloaded many unnecessary yet entertaining apps such as Shopee, Pinterest, Tik Tok, and games on your phone. When we hear notifications from Shopee ("Shopee"), we can't help but turn on our phones to check out the new deals happening. When YouTube keeps sending new recommended videos, reels and content to us, we may "accidentally" click on the notification floating on top and end up browsing the Internet for the whole day. It will be our “perfect” excuse for procrastinating again. Therefore, we should turn off notification ringtones for irrelevant apps so that we will not receive these "interrupting" and "engaging" notifications. I am not forcing anyone to delete the applications but we should be disciplined and aware of time-balancing between social media and necessary things. So Fonzies, make sure you have completed your top priorities before scrolling through those “funny” cat memes on Tik Tok!

3. Avoid using a power bank. Don’t use your phone while it is charging!

We just can’t seem to put away our phones even though the phone battery is low. We always assume there is nothing to worry about if we have a power bank along so that we can continue watching movies on Netflix and variety shows on YouTube while the phone is charging. However, in this challenge, I highly encourage all of you to keep your power bank away and not bring it along wherever you go. Challenge yourself that you can only charge your phone at home once every day (unless you need your laptop to study or do assignments). You will not use your phone frequently when you can’t keep charging it. In short, this challenge is really helpful to distract you from social media and put more concentration on other important matters since you have to prevent battery drainage.

4. Move entertaining apps to your laptop.

The mobile version for most applications is more convenient to access wherever we go. We can easily open Lazada to shop online when we are waiting for food to come as dining out. We can scroll through Instagram to see IG stories when we are taking LRT. We can connect Spotify to the car's audio system to listen to songs when driving. It seems that we are constantly revolving around social media throughout the day. Thus, the next challenge is here! From now on, try moving some of your entertaining applications from your phone to your laptop. Since the laptop version is harder to navigate around, you will reduce the number of visits to your social media accounts as you are required to turn on your laptop over and over again whenever you want to use the app. Speaking from experience, mouse clicking is NOT as convenient as finger tapping. Moreover, nobody likes to carry a laptop backpack moving around. Hence, you will have lesser time to indulge in social media. Your hand might itch to use your phone for the initial stage. But trust me, this is an effective method to break your social media addiction.

5. Turn on your screen time tracker.

Have you turned on the screen time tracker on your phone? If you have not done yet, please do so! Turn your screen time tracker into a widget and put it on your home screen. It helps you record your browsing time on each application as well as helps you summarize your phone activities for each day. In this case, you will feel more “guilty” when you see a long screen time usage. 5 hours, 8 hours, or even more! You might feel regretful about wasting your golden time on unnecessary things until you realize that it becomes an addiction. From realizing this, the clash between your guiltiness and self-discipline leads you to a change. All in all, dear Fonzies, I hope by doing so, you are aware of the time boundary between your physical life and the virtual world.

6. Always log out of your social media account after browsing it.

Another tip in this challenge! You shall log out of your social media account after you have finished browsing it every time you visit. As you know, humans loathe doing repetitive stuff, especially when it comes to logging in to an account. However, if we make it a habit to log out of our social accounts each time we visit, it will be more time-consuming for us to log in again. This prevents us from frequently opening the app as we are irritated by doing the same action repeatedly.

7. Discover your “hidden” interests!

Another effective way to distract from social media is to explore your interests. Figure out a hobby or a thing that you are passionate about to fulfil your day instead of keeping your eyes on social media. From going to a café or library to enjoy reading to cycling, jogging, or striding and playing sports, there is a wide range of activities that you can do to distract yourself from social media. If you like playing virtual games on social media or stimulating activities, why don't you try out the physical escape room? Looking for other activities can effectively pull you away from the virtual world. Therefore, break your social media addiction by discovering your interests.

8. Hang out with friends.

Instead of chatting with friends online for the whole day, and making yourself busy replying to messages with texts, emojis, stickers and audio, why don't you meet each other physically? Move your conversations and gossipy topics to face-to-face chats. In this case, you need not keep your eyes on the phone screen and be distracted by notifications. Furthermore, we often keep scrolling on social media for no specific purpose at all. Instead, try to talk with friends or the ones whom you trust whenever you have anything to share. You can hang out with your besties to have a picnic trip or short travel around which are great ways to be distant from the Internet.

To add on, you are always welcome to join any upcoming activities held by the

SFP Student Committee

to meet new friends and give yourself a break from social media.

So, do stay tuned on our Fonz Website and SFPSC Instagram for more exciting events! Or, better, come to join the FAMILY! You will not regret it, I promise!

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That is the end of the list of challenges! I have assigned 8 tasks for your practice. I hope that you can try them out to overcome social media addiction. They might be difficult at first, but once you make the first step, the rest will be a piece of cake. I assure you.

You can do it, Fonzies!!!

Written by,

Zi Wei

The Fonz