Why It’s Important to Balance Your Online Time with Offline Pursuits
The Internet is a completely dominant feature of all of our lives these days, and we all tend to live “online” to an increasingly significant degree. It might well be the case that your job takes place via the web, that you communicate with your friends via the web, that you do your shopping via the web, and that you entertain yourself during your leisure hours via the web, as well.
The Internet can be beneficial, of course, especially when it comes to searching for practical and relevant information such as a commercial landscaping company near me. Beyond the purely pragmatic, though, it’s important to avoid spending too much time online. Here are a few reasons why it’s important to balance your online time with offline pursuits.
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Because it’s important to keep yourself anchored so that you don’t get too lost in abstraction
One thing about the Internet is that it’s full of information, entertainment options, and possibilities that are all predominantly “abstract.” When you explore cyberspace, you are exploring intangible chunks of information that don’t directly translate to action in the real world around you. This can fuel over-thinking, analysis paralysis, endless reflection, and mundane and disconnected arguments. When you get offline and out into the world at large, things are different.
Suddenly, you’re in an arena where you actually have to take action, confront people face-to-face, and explore possibilities practically. In other words, spending time offline helps you stay anchored not to get too lost in abstraction.
Because you will likely be calmer and better able to focus if you do
For all the benefits of the Internet, there’s plenty of evidence that spending too much time surfing the web can contribute significantly to anxiety and chronically scattered thoughts. Specifically, research has shown that people who spend more time on social media platforms are more depressed and anxious than their peers.
It isn’t easy to remain calm, centered, and balanced when you never get a moment of mental calm between all the different snippets of information that are flying around. Of course, one consequence of becoming too used to this perpetual distraction is that it becomes much more challenging for you to actually settle down and focus on one thing at a time when you want to.
Because the Internet can be addictive, and it’s important to stay balanced
Internet addiction is increasingly being recognized as a genuine psychological condition, and so, too, are associated issues such as videogame addiction and social media addiction. While there are plenty of valuable resources online, it’s also important to realize that the Internet presents a “supernormal stimulus” that can hijack systems in our brain that evolved in very different circumstances.
The cycle of constant novelty, for example, can be addictive in and of itself and can drive you to keep mindlessly clicking from article to article, and thread to thread, even if you don’t really want to, in any straightforward sense. Be mindful of when you are spending time online, not because you have a specific goal you’re trying to achieve, but just because you are addicted to the cycle.
