Some signs to look out for are the following. If you suffer from any of these 5 signs, there is a great chance you are also affected by Facebook addiction and you should take a closer look at your surfing habits to see what you can do about them.
- You lose sleep over Facebook
- You add every random person you meet
- You spend more than an hour a day on FB
- You can't go for a day without FB
- You use Facebook on your smartphone
One big signal that you are really addicted to the social network is the fact that you lose sleep over your activities there. Maybe it is a comment you made on somebody else's picture and how they are going to react, or whether your crush will comment on the newest picture you put online; or a status update by one of your friends that you might have gotten wrong, or similar examples. We have had reports of many readers that told us stories like these that kept them worrying and from falling asleep at night.
If you have a compulsive need to add every random person you meet in your day on Facebook, just so you can "be friends", chances are that you take Facebook a bit too seriously. It can almost be like a mechanism in your brain that is telling you during a conversation: "Hey, this person is cool. Let's add them on Facebook so we can stay in touch." While it may not be a bad idea to keep in touch, the constant need to add every person on Facebook certainly shows a negative habit. Sometimes you just meet strangers during the day that you will never see again. Deal with it.
Put into effective time, the general rule would be that if you spend more than a maximum of an hour each day on the site, you are spending too much time there. Surely it depends whether you are a middle manager at a big company or "just" a student who has more time to sit in front of the computer - but no person should seriously spend more time than that a day on Facebook. In fact, one hour is still a lot. If all you did was to stay in contact with friends, write messages to meet up or exchange yourself, would you seriously need an hour for that?
The hard exercise of every addict is to go without the drug for a day (or a certain specified amount of time). Since Facebook is pretty much a "good of daily use", the test is whether you can go without it for a day or not. Most people, even when they say they are not addicted, have a really hard time doing so. The inability to stay away for a day shows how much Facebook has become a part of your normal life and proves in fact that you are addicted.
One more sign that you can not go without "the drug" is using your smartphones to check for status updates or send messages via Facebook. We are of that opinion because you could certainly get along well with just using the computer to be on the site. Smartphones unfortunately make it so easy to go onto the site that they can dramatically increase your dependence and "help" you waste so many hours on the network.
Of course there are even more signs that will tell you about your dependence on Facebook, but these 5 will give you a good idea of where you are at. So what should you do when you find out that you are in fact "addicted to Facebook"?
Well, awareness certainly is the first step. And the second step should probably be to check your surfing habits and see that you start spending less and less time on the site, maybe even quitting Facebook if you decide to do so. However, Facebook addiction is trickier than one would think, and it can be almost impossible to quit unless you know what you are doing.
