Avoiding Social Media Time Traps

 ADHD Weekly, March 21, 2019


Your attention is a commodity. It’s being bought and sold on the open market every time you go online. We offer up our attentional resources for free when we play games or surf through social media.

The challenge for anyone with ADHD is self-regulation when it comes to social media. Self-regulation is an executive function—one of the capacities that sets humans apart from other animals, and one that sets adults apart from children.

Did you know that self-regulation involves assigning and guarding our attentional resources throughout the day? Social media, though, has a way of slipping through our careful safeguards to siphon our attention for long periods of time. Read The Sirens of Today: ADHD, Social Media, and Self-Regulation in Attention magazine to learn what you can do to invest your limited and valuable attentional resources in the ways you want.

Join the discussion: How do you manage social media use?