Are You A FaceBook Addict?

Its Monday morning, the start of another work week and you find yourself, like you also do, sitting at your computer, trying to motivate yourself, yet again, to embark on another thrill ride of mindless, stress induced work related activities you need to get done by the end of the day or else. You have to make your boss happy, if you want him to continue signing your paychecks. So you chug down your latest energy drink and prepare yourself to be productive. You feel the energy rush throughout your body. You’re motivated, you’re driven, you’re…ON FACEBOOK???

Are you a Facebook addict? Either at the workplace or at home, people have become so obsessed with logging onto their Facebook account, at least every fifteen or twenty minutes out of the day, that it could be a major problem. A number of people have experienced problems in their health, relationships, and careers, because they have dedicated so much of their lives in front of the computer log on to Facebook and have stopped living a normal life. Most people aren’t even aware that frequent visits to your Facebook account can cause something psychologists refer to as intermittent reinforcement. People get an unpredictable high, much like gambling, from the anticipation from being rewarded by notifications, messages, and invites. This can be highly addictive and damaging to one’s life, if not addressed quickly.

Now, I clearly admit I love Facebook, “the place where everybody knows your name and wants to be your friend,” and I am guilty of those frequent visits late at night, when I can’t sleep, just to chat with my other “insomniac” friends or simply to catch up on what’s been going on in the lives of friends I haven’t seen in a very long time. It’s funny now that I think about it, but there has been a few times lately, where I noticed myself logging on to Facebook, without any logical reason why. So maybe I have become a Facebook addict myself. So what about you? Are you a Facebook addict? Are you living more online than you are offline? Well here are five clues that can help you determine if you are a Facebook addict.