By Josh Kohlbach, CEO and founder of Rymera Web Co, the makers of Wholesale Suite, the No. 1 WooCommerce wholesale solution.

We all love social media. No matter how hard we try, it’s impossible to resist our temptation to scroll through our feeds every now and then. And why not? After all, it gives you a sneak peek into the world without even stepping out of your door.

But, there’s the added pressure of staying up to date with the latest trends and the need to compulsively post about every little thing and let the world know what’s happening in your life. And not in just one platform but across different platforms. For that, you have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Whatsapp and so many others to take care of.

But simply posting isn’t enough. You also need to reply to the comments you get on your posts, engage with other posts to get more engagement in yours and do so much more. By the time you’re done, you realize that you’ve spent more than half of the day liking, posting and commenting on social media.

Now, you think it’s time to start working on your most important project. But then, you keep wondering how many likes you might have received. You try not to check, but the urge is too strong to resist. So you give in.

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After a while, you’re done. But it’s 5 p.m. already, and you have a deadline the very next day. So you end up staying up all night to complete your task. And because of that, you spend the following day cranky, unproductive and sleepy.

This is just an example. There are likely many other instances when social media kills your productivity and affects you in other ways.

If you want to end this vicious cycle, it’s time for you to beat social media distractions to stay productive and boost your creativity. Here are a few ways you can try out to combat your social media addiction.

Create a distraction-free zone.

Social media is extremely engaging, which makes it distracting too. And it’s difficult to stay away from it. But you can stop yourself from indulging in any social media activities by creating a distraction-free zone for yourself.

All you have to do is to keep your phone away from this zone and resist the temptation to break away from this area. This can be difficult in the beginning. But you can manage it with a little bit of practice. You don’t have to do it for the entire day. Just try doing it for two to three hours a day and see what difference it makes.

Use a social media blocker.

It’s tempting to open multiple tabs while working, one of which is solely dedicated to social media. And you end up spending hours scrolling through it without even realizing how quickly the time went by.

If you don’t want that to happen, try using a social media blocker. These blockers come in the form of extensions, so when you add them to your browser, they block all social media from opening even if you try logging in.

You can also set timers for these blockers. For example, if you set it at 15 minutes, it makes sure that you are denied access to any social platform for those 15 minutes. After that, you can log in for five minutes or so before it blocks it again.

Turn off notifications.

It’s difficult not to check your phone when you hear that beep. So why not turn off your social media notifications entirely to stop them from distracting you? That way, you won’t even know if you have a notification or a message in your inbox. It’s a great way to beat social media distractions and regain productivity.

Set a schedule for checking social media.

Social media can be distracting, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t use it at all. You’re only trying to beat the distraction it’s causing, not banish it entirely. So it’s OK if you can use it within limits.

A good way of doing that is to set a schedule for checking social media. Stop scrolling through your feed randomly during your working hours. Instead, choose a particular time for it. You can pick any time after working hours or when you’re taking a break or not doing anything productive. This will ensure that you’re using it without affecting your daily routine and keep you entertained too.

Most of us are addicted to social media. It’s a great way of overcoming boredom and keeping in touch with friends and family you don’t meet with often. But using it to the extent that it affects your personal and professional life can be problematic. This doesn’t mean that you’ll ban it entirely. Instead, learn how to contain your usage. The above points can help you do that super effectively, so try them out and see if you can beat your social media distractions.

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Ever look at the clock and realize you’ve spent the last two hours surfing the Internet, reading Twitter posts, snapchatting on Snapchat or pinning on Pinterest?

10 ways social media is distracting:

1. You seemingly have to watch what everyone else is up to: liking posts and following the live feeds. Otherwise you might miss something – right?
2. You find yourself stalking people… wondering what they’re up to at any given time…
3. You get drawn into content that might be interesting, but isn’t relevant to your studies or purpose.
4. You end up taking Wiki walks, even if you didn’t mean to. (Randomly following Wikipedia links (or others) and reading articles, which ends up wasting a lot of time) The longer the walk, the more unrelated the articles become.
5. You end up watching each account in case anyone contacts you directly
6. If anyone does contact or mention you, you drop everything you’re doing and respond instantly to any comment or communication that comes your way.
7. There are too many accounts and feeds to focus on.
8. There are too many people to follow.
9. You find yourself wandering the social mediasphere aimlessly, looking for relevant content.
10. You ended up looking at what your friends were up to all day instead of doing your work.

I know people who have punted and just said no to using social media. While that is a solution, it’s not a very relevant one for those of us who do want to be effective in connecting with people near and far. A better one is making a conscious choice about how you use your time moment by moment. Here are some actions for avoiding social media and personal technology distractions:

• Turn off alerts and notifications (do not disturb for iPhones and there are apps for Android users).
• Check e-mail only three times a day.
• Use a second monitor (to decrease window-switching time).
• Schedule regular blocks of time to turn off your phone.
• Try creating a “3 Most Important Things for Today List” at the start of your day. Then at the end of the day, look at it, reflect on what you did – and plan for tomorrow. The hard part is to not go online or check email until you get your three things done. We can practice this in session.

We all face distractions on a daily basis. Distractions not only lower our productivity; they also increase our stress. You probably already know what distracts you the most—phone calls, emails, selfies, texting, Internet browsing, interrupting co-workers (fellow students or friends) and so on. Strategies like scheduling email checks, turning off your phone and leaving the office (your dorm/room) for a quieter environment may eliminate distractions so that you get more done.

10 ways not to be distracted by social media:

1. Close news and social media sites. A helpful tip is to create an aggregated feed of all your favorite news sites. This helps you avoid wasting time wandering the Internet for headlines and updates.
2. Close your Internet browser when you’re working. The precious seconds it takes to load the browser when you feel tempted to go online may be just the moment you need to become conscious of the time you’re wasting. If you must be logged in on a continual basis, try restricting yourself to three or four browser tabs for work-related sites. Close everything else.
3. Plan times to interact with it. You may need to schedule when you will use social media, check Facebook or post selfies. If you allow yourself scheduled time each day to do this you can focus more on getting your work done instead of wondering where that time went. Stick to those times!
4. Stick to the plan. Be disciplined, trust your plan, stick to it and review how it’s working, when you said you would. (It’s ok not to be on IG (Instagram) all day, really!)
5. Reflect and adjust. You will want to closely monitor yourself on a daily and weekly basis and make adjustments. You should regularly ask yourself the following questions. While these are related to your studies and how to better acquire new skills, you could just as well use them in any work or life situation.
   • What is my main goal?
   • What is my goal for the week?
   • What do I need to do today?
   • Where am I at the moment?
   • Is this technique/schedule/place/relationship/situation working?
   • Is it worth improving? How can I improve it?

1. Find the right place to study or work. Picking the right place to study is crucial because it has a major influence on the efficiency of the learning process. While you might like to study in your room, you’ll easily be distracted by TV, video games, or fashion magazines lying next to your bed. A coffee shop might seem like a good option but it can be noisy at times. Be sure to find a quiet and well lit place. If you are planning on spending long hours working or studying, it’s a good idea to make sure that your chair and desk are ergonomically designed for greater productivity. A bad physical setup can mess up both your posture and your work efficiency. And don’t forget snacks!
2. Managing Physical Space. When you see clutter in your physical work spaces, try to take that as a sign that you need to hit a pause button. Usually it is because you are doing too much.
3. Try online quarantine. For extreme measures, install Freedom, Anti-Social, SelfControl, Cold Turkey, or RescueTime, which put a temporary barrier on your access to certain websites on the net. Add all your social media sites to the blacklist. We can do this in coaching!
4. Cut down. Choose and use the right types of social media. You don’t have to have or use every one. digmytwitfaceplusstumbleblogtube…!
5. Just Say No (#YOLO). Maybe you are going to say no to social media for a day and go to meet with people, read a book, or take a walk. When I’m feeling most overwhelmed, I take a break. Even if it is just to get up and walk around my desk. The important thing is to disconnect every now and then so you can re-center and focus.

Social media is awesome but when it starts interfering to the point that your grades are suffering, you can’t or aren’t getting anything else done it is time to try some of the above techniques. If you feel your social media use is to the point where it is really out of hand (see below for a few signs) please let me or someone else you feel comfortable with know.

Some Signs Your Social Media Use is Out of Hand

• Losing track of time online
• Having trouble completing tasks at work or home
• Isolation from family and friends
• Feeling guilty or defensive about your Internet use
• Feeling a sense of euphoria while involved in Internet activities

Social media addiction has gotten to the point where some people prefer Facebook over sex, do status updates from the bathroom or upon waking at night, or even utter threats to the President on Twitter – a very public electronic medium – (obviously without realizing that sedition is illegal). While the addiction to socialize might be innate, excess time online can aggravate or stimulate symptoms of depression. Clearly there’s a problem and it’s growing, and since social media and social networks are very unlikely to disappear anytime soon, there are some precautions that high-frequency users might to take to keep addiction in check, thus leaving more productive or fun time available for real-life activities.

1. Focus. Limit the number of social networks you use to only those most relevant to your work and personal life. For example, in the past I’ve regularly used LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook for work and Plurk for personal use.
2. Cull your network. If you really don’t know someone well or at all, don’t feel obligated to friend or follow them. Even though social media plays a large part in my daily work, I still do not approve every friend request. The person has to have some connection to me, either friends or interests in common, and has to display a real profile pic, not an avatar, photo of an inanimate object, or some random starlet.
3. Use lists and filters. Sometimes there’s are pressing reasons for being connected to someone (i.e., not unfriending them), though you might want a temporary way to filter for a specific group of people without permanently “hiding” the status updates of other people. Both Twitter and Facebook offer friend list features that, if implemented properly, let you quickly view the status updates of a specific group of people. This way, you can view just the updates that are most relevant to you at any given moment. So if you associate certain roles or tasks with each list (business, personal, friends, friends + acquaintances, digital-only friends, etc.), it’ll be easier to filter for the updates you want to see.
4. Use a schedule. Schedule your use of social media. Unless there’s an overwhelming reason otherwise, don’t leave Facebook or other social media sites open in a web browser tab all the time. The same goes for desktop Twitter or Facebook clients such as Tweetdeck, which end up being a huge distraction, especially if you follow/ friend a lot of people. I simply have trouble working when running desktop clients, so I’ve stopped using them except when I’m doing a bit of Twitter-based research. One way to avoid problems is to schedule your use of social networking sites in the same way that some productivity experts suggest scheduling reading of email messages.
5. Set a timer. If after trying all of the above, you’re still having difficulty keeping track of time when you use social networking sites, trying setting a timer of some sort, with an alarm. For a very extreme method, you can use your smartphone or an alarm clock, but if you can have the timer/ alarm sound as annoying as possible (and out of reach of your arm), you’ll possibly start to associate using social networking with having to get out of your chair and turn off the annoyance. This might not help everyone, but it’s worth a try.

This is just a start on tips for keeping a social media addiction at bay. After finding myself answering email and checking Facebook from my iPhone while brushing my teeth each morning, and once nearly carrying it in the shower, I’ve tried to be more aware of such tendencies. Do you find yourself addicted to social networks and other social media? How do you cope with it, or does it affect your life? Feel free to share your thoughts.

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Love it or hate it, social media apps such as Facebook and Instagram have profoundly changed the way we think, communicate and socialize as a society. Instagram is even beginning to change features ( by hiding likes, for example ) in response to studies linking social media usage to increased rates of mental health issues like anxiety and depression . Given that mental health experts, researchers and other pros are voicing concerns on how our social-media obsessed society can more cause harm than we may have guessed, you may be wondering if it’s affecting your own mental health.

Now that more people are talking about the negative effects of using social media too much, it’s common to see friends on Instagram announce they’re doing a “detox” or taking a break from the apps for a period of time. But is quitting social media (even for a few days) a good idea and can it really help you in the long term?

According to Dr. Logan Jones, psychologist and founder of NYC Therapy + Wellness, it depends. While taking a break from social media can be helpful in some cases, according to Jones, there’s a lot more to be said surrounding why you’re taking a break in the first place.

Keep reading to find out why taking a break from social media is not enough to change your health, and how to make your social media use better for your mental health.

In our age of social media, it’s easy to get sucked into checking every app.

Chesnot / Getty Images

Why simply quitting social media isn’t enough

First, it’s important to keep in mind that social media is literally addictive. Just like a drug, it’s designed to trigger reward centers in your brain every time you see a notification on your phone or a like on your latest Instagram post. And this is why the cold-turkey approach sometimes won’t cut it (or will be so tough you’ll give up).

“On a deeper level, these social media companies know exactly what they are doing [from] a neurological perspective. What they’re doing is called intermittent reinforcement — it’s what casinos do too with slot machines. And it’s the same with swiping on Tinder or checking your Instagram. The addiction is the reward pathway, it’s a dopamine hit,” Jones said.

Instead of totally quitting your social media, Jones recommends taking smaller steps to mitigate your habits. “I think it’s a problem when people start too big. Start somewhere, where there’s the least resistance,” Jones said. Examples of small steps to help break your addiction include turning off notifications, turning off vibrate, and using a feature on your phone that monitors how much time you spend on social apps .

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Something I’ve personally found helpful with creating better boundaries around my own social media use is implementing “cut-off” times for my phone. Starting around 9 p.m., I won’t check social media and I won’t look at it again until after 7:30 or 8 a.m. the next day. While I’m not totally avoiding using it, I feel like this time frame helps me feel much more centered and positive, not reactive and distracted.