Every other day when I get bored from work, I login to my Facebook account and start browsing through the profile of my friends (so-called Internet friends whom I have not met or spoken to in ages). Hours go by before I realize that I need to go back to work.

It’s weird that I’m intrigued with what my friends are doing in their personal life, where are they working, which places they visited, are they married, do they have kids, etc.

I’m not an addict, I work on computers whole day, so Internet is an integral part of what I do. Before these social networking profiles came into picture, I would spend my free time browsing some news, or reading a whitepaper. But now it’s spent mostly in this digital maze of social media. At times its incredibly compulsive, very much like compulsion to smoke or do drugs. My brain says, “Don’t do this, it’s a waste of time and you might feel sad with pangs of jealousy engulfing you”, but my fingers click anyways.

I wouldn’t blame Internet or Facebook for my addiction. People use it to stay connected with their friends and families, which is not bad if you think about it. But there are few of us who get addicted with this and become outright Internet addicts.

I think a new medical term called as “Social Media Stalking Addiction” should be introduced in the medical dictionary.

I’m not like this all days, but there are days when I’m not able to balance my digitally social life with my “real” physical life. It’s like Facebook is a big whole which easily sucks me into it and where I spend hours and hours of my workday clicking around on friends of friends’ pictures, reading their wall posts, and basically stalking them. I even do it to random people I’ve seen at meetings or in trains who I barely know! I just can’t seem to stop, even when I know I should.

Sometimes because of this addiction, I’m constantly living under the threat of “compare and despair”. I would keep looking at my friend’s pictures and status updates to see what they were doing, if they were visiting exotic places while I was sitting and getting bored at work.

I do want to get out of this addition but it just doesn’t let me go. My nature of work requires me to keep up many Facebook business pages and so I can’t help but login to Facebook everyday.

I have been meaning to stop this addiction for a while and writing this post and admitting that I’m an addict is the first step.

Now, I have decided to just directly visit the business pages and ignore the new feeds in my personal timeline and also avoiding searching random profiles.

It might take lot more than just the thought of becoming sober, but I’m prepared to take the baby steps to reach there.

Are there any other tips out there to help me with this?