By: Alex Coleman [Ads Editor]
Snapchat, Ask.fm, Facebook, Twitter, Vine, YouTube, dozens and dozens of other sites, social networking is huge in todays world. Whether people have just one, or one of everything, social networking plays a major part in almost everyone’s lives. But is that good? Is all that time wasted on Pinterest pinning recipes that you’re never going to make a good use of time?
A very common high school problem is stress. Stress about homework, stress about friends, stress about stress, everyone stresses about something. There are many causes for these varying levels of stress; lack of sleep, overwork, and lousy time management are a few of these. However, one of the biggest causes for stress is procrastination, waiting to the last minute. The teacher might have given the student a week to write their five page long essay, but their twitter feed calls to them all week long. Come the Friday when that research paper on the eating habits of lions is due, the only research done all week was searching tumblr for cool pictures of lions, but how could this be avoided?
For one, the student could be responsible and leave their phone, computer, or tablet out of reach, alleviating all ways to be tempted to write a Facebook status. Most students do not possess the will power to put away these devices. Another solution would be for the parents to take said devices away until that lovely research paper is typed and printed. Both of these methods would work rather well, but there is another way.
Cutting down on social media usage during spare time could eventually cause the want to scroll through social media to disappear. Obviously the want is not going to disappear entirely, but it could at least come down to a level where the person could control it. Priorities are also a major part of this fight with internet, if a student truly does not want to get their homework done then theres a good chance it’s not getting done. Sometimes, the students need to buck up and convince themselves to do homework.
Overall, social media can be very distracting. It’s just another way to get the human brain to focus on something other than what it needs to. It’s not necessarily the people’s faults, the brain sees a distraction and pounces on it. Anything to distract from the boring paper. In the end, it’s up to the person to make themselves stop procrastinating. Yes, it’s easy and yes, it seems okay at the time, but later on they’re going to regret logging on to Ask.fm instead of typing their paper. Prioritize, self control, and a little bit of forcing one’s self to do something they don’t want. It’s better in the long run.
