Cure That Facebook Addiction

Do you find yourself tweeting or Facebooking when you should be working or studying instead? Like everything else, extreme activity on social networking sites is bad for you. It's counter-productive and unhealthy. Some employees have been fired--or received disciplinary action at least. Some friendships have been broken. Don't even let me get me started. I should know. I was a self-confessed Facebook addict  until I decided to take action. Now, I can go for days without logging in to Facebook or Twitter. There is no secret formula to fighting social network addiction. It all depends on your willpower. Let me share with you some rehab tips:

Deleting applications

Becoming app-aholic is a major symptom of addiction to social networking sites. Remove applications that require regular interaction, such as simulation games. As human beings are creatures of habit, it's easy to get caught in a trap. Pretty soon, you'll find yourself going online just to make sure that your scores won't fall even if there's nothing at stake. If deleting these apps seem to drastic for you, take it one step at a time. For instance, delete one game that you're most likely to check/play on a daily basis and leave apps that don't take up too much of your time. Later on, you'll realize that you don't really need all these apps, and removing them gets easier.

Limiting notifications

If seeing the red flag makes your heartbeat go fast, or if you find yourself clicking on "@yournamehere" every now and then, you know you've become addicted to feedback. Keep your notifications settings at a minimum, such as allowing alerts only for messages posted on your wall. If you leave your notification for photo comments "on," you'll find replying to comments hard to resist. And before long, you're logging in hours just browsing through friends' photos, caught in an endless comment exchange. Turn off alerts sent directly to your e-mail as well. This way, you won't be tempted to log in to the social networking site each time you check your mail at work.

Using alternative sites

Don't get me wrong. This isn't about replacing one bad habit with another. Try to find a site that allows you to post an update on all your social networks. Mine is Plurk, a microblogging site like Twitter, but with a more user-friendly interface. It works more like a personal journal, and you can count on it to be spam-free. Since it syncs my posts to my FB and Twitter accounts, I don't have to log in to these sites anymore. For this reason, I don't get to see feedback as often as I used to. After a while, I found that my "need" to reply to comments began to fade. 

If your addiction is really severe, you might want to consider Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. A word of caution, though: its actions, such as deleting all your contacts, will be permanent, leaving only a "cyberskeleton," or a blank profile. Why would you do this when you can simply deactivate your account, you ask? With FB, you can always re-activate your account without losing all your connections and previous inputs, so it's just like being invisible for a while. As for Suicide Machine, it's designed to kill your online social life, so this means that it will purge all your records and prohibit any future attempts to re-activate your accounts. It works the same for MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter. There's even going to be a cybermemorial held for you on the site.

As you can see, Suicide Machine should only be a last resort. After all, social network sites have their benefits too, such as increasing traffic to your blogs or reconnecting with long-lost friends. Stopping your addiction to online social networking doesn't have to mean becoming anti-social. It's about enjoying their service without letting them control you. Try these rehab tips and be free of your addiction. I did it; so can you. Good luck!