Hamilton: Social media distracting people from the natural world

Lewis Hamilton says the presence of social media in today's culture is distracting people from the natural beauties of the world.

Hamilton, who was over 28.5 million followers across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, described the platforms as “incredible tools”.

When speaking about maintaining mental health, the six-time world champion says he is mindful of how he uses his social media pages, as he wants to use it to sent powerful messages, rather than uploading “unimportant stuff”. 

“Mental health, I know, is such a serious issue worldwide. I struggle with social media because I’ve got this incredible following,” Hamilton said. “It’s incredible, I never thought I would have this many people following me. It’s a lot.

“But social media, if you look around there are people who are on social media all day, every day, looking at their phones and forgetting the rest of the world. Not taking time to see a sunset, not taking the time to see beautiful trees, or whatever it is.

“So I’m trying to always find a balance. Mentally, it’s really about feeling good about yourself. It’s about finding a way to love yourself, you’ve really got to love yourself and be comfortable.

“I’ve been taking time to make sure I appreciate me, acknowledging things you do well. Acknowledging that when you fail, it’s okay and not be so hard on yourself. All these different things.”

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Hamilton admits that he has days where he wakes up and has motivation problems over training for Formula 1, before questioning if he should continue racing 

“I have days where I wake up and I don’t feel motivated to work out. I feel ‘Should I continue racing?’, I think all these different things. And the next hour, it passes, and I say ‘I love what I do, why would I consider not continuing’.

“But as I said, you’ve got to keep your mind occupied all the time. I’ve been reading as much as I can. I’ve been getting into meditation. I’m a fidget, so it’s really hard to do meditation for me! I’m sitting there, moving around and then there’s bugs on my arm. It’s really hard. But the more you do it, like with anything, the better you get at it.”

'People don't understand success takes work'

Hamilton added that people see successful stars today on the internet and want to taste the accomplishment that they have achieved in their business.

But according to Hamilton, those people fail to realise that a lot of work has been done over a long period of time in order to get to that stage.   

“Today, people see figures who are successful and are like ‘I want that, I want to be Drake, Madonna, Michael Jordan, Kobe’. A top athlete, whatever it may be. But they just want to be there immediately, and there’s all these work that it takes to get there.

“And so just remembering that, pulling back the layers and remembering you got to do all the ground work and hustle hard. If you keep rafting way, you can continue to refine. I always try and make sure I sent positively in the messages.

“I don’t want to squander the platforms I have. I want to share pictures of me and my friends for example, doing normal stuff. But it’s such a powerful tool, I don’t want to use it for unimportant stuff.”