Can social media seriously harm your mental health?
It’s the hot topic that seems to be everywhere at the moment, so I thought I’d add some fuel to the fire. We are starting to wake up and realize that we’ve been so distracted by hilarious videos and memes recently that we’ve actually missed out on cumulative months of our lives.
We are slaves to our devices. They’re brilliant machines that serve as a platform for businesses and allow us to freely express ourselves on any subject we want, but can we cope with it all as much as we think?
Can you remember the last thing you looked at on your phone? I certainly can’t. In fact, I don’t think I can retain 99% of the information I see on the internet unless I am consciously researching something I want to learn. It’s all just grey matter to me. I can’t tell one ‘Instagram model’ from another.
So this is one element of the argument that I believe doesn’t need any debate; social media is a time robber. When I was struggling badly with anxiety and was at my worst (basically too scared to leave the house), I had social media there as my only friend. I had the internet at my fingertips and it diluted the pain of being stuck in the house and being alone. Therefore, undoubtedly it took me longer to get out of the hole. It was the perfect distraction. I didn’t have to see my friends, because they all existed right there, inside my phone.
I looked at my dog one day, and he had been staring at me for a good half an hour. I suddenly saw the world through his eyes and thought this creature is staring at me staring at a metal rectangle with pixels. It made me laugh, but also woke me up. It’s madness.
I researched a lot of studies before writing this because I thought it would be super smart to include some conclusive evidence and science. But I was pretty disappointed when they all seemed to amount to the same thing: there is not yet enough concrete evidence. I think that’s because it’s so damn hard to measure something that’s such a new phenomenon.
So, instead, I scrapped all of that and just decided to write entirely from my personal experience, the only thing I can honestly share.
Personally. since using social media, my anxiety has increased.
The big wake up call for me was when I started getting panic attacks a few years ago. I didn’t relate it to my use of my phone, as I had so much else going on in my life, but looking back I can clearly see how much of an influence it had. I’d come out of a trance looking at my phone feeling like I wanted to cry.
Now, years later, when I step away from it all and take forced ‘social media detoxes’, something shifts in me, and it feels like peace. It seems ridiculous that the title ‘social media detox’ even needs to exist, but social media is here to stay and we are going to have to acknowledge that.
I used to have every excuse at the ready for friends and family “Oh, I only use it for my business”, “I just have Facebook to keep in touch with old friends when I travel” “I don’t look at other people’s stuff, I just post”. I call my own bullshit on this one. I can mindlessly open my phone when boredom strikes and in 30 seconds I’ve learned what my pornstar name is, how to contour make-up and watched a kid yodelling. It’s information overload, and we can’t compute it.
I think a lot of us are still in denial that we’re addicted to our phones, and get shifty when it’s brought up, but the fact is its human nature to become addicted to anything that gives us pleasure and we can’t help it.
We are creatures of cue-habit-reward, (I bang on about this a lot, but I first heard about this reading The Chimp Paradox by Prof. Steve Peters a few years ago. Thanks for changing my thought process forever, Steve-o) and because of this fact, a large amount of our lives is shaped around subconscious reward-seeking.
In the case of the mobile phone age, the ‘cue’ might be our phone vibrating, our brain sparks up and instantly knows that it has to perform the habit (pick up the phone, unlock and look at it) in order to gain the reward (the Instagram post, Snapchat or Whatsapp message). We get so hooked on this that checking our phone becomes a knee-jerk reaction, and for some reason, we hate admitting that we are at the mercy of our habits. We like to think we’re in control all the time, but we do spend a lot of time living subconsciously, not consciously.
But hey, if we can understand this fact, we can also begin to identify and break these habits. Woohoo! (In fact to prove this to myself, a couple of weeks ago I moved the apps around on my phone. I found myself my phone and subconsciously going to press the Instagram button that was no longer there. Something as small as doing this helps wake you up!)
There’s one more thing that really niggles at me though:
We can’t make our mistakes in private anymore.
There was a time not so long ago when I was a pretty vulnerable teenager, who spent years of being painfully shy, with a sudden surge of self-confidence. I got into modeling. I posted some pretty explicit photos online. At the time I was ‘empowered’, but I look back and cringe, as they were totally out of character and wish I could have told myself the effect that would have had. It took a long time (and a lot of blocking online trolls) to get over it. But it was done, and I learned from it. Everything we post is permanent, and we all have a different voice online. Keyboard warriors, I’m looking at you.
I think everything I’ve stated so far is fairly obvious to all of us, though, and with just a bit of filtering out and conscious use, I believe we can still use it in a relatively healthy and beneficial way… but the big question is this: can it do serious damage?
When I spoke at an event in London back in the summer on ‘achieving optimum mental health’, I covered lots on the subject of stress and the effects it has on the brain long-term. In a nutshell, we haven’t physically evolved that much since being cavemen and we are designed to move. moving is what allows our brains to grow, change and repair, and most importantly, deal with stress.
Seeing something that triggers any form of stress without dealing with it (aka moving the body to release the cortisol), causes a surplus of cortisol, which over a long enough period of time can cause brain cells to erode. That f***ing sucks. If you can’t see where I’m going with this, read the next bit:
Ever sat still and stared at your phone for an hour in a heated keyboard warrior debate or just read something that boils your blood, only to look up afterward and feel incredibly stressed out? This is why! Our brain isn’t able to differentiate this stress with if a stressful event had actually happened!!!
So, to go back to the original question, I think that yes, social media could do some serious lasting damage to those who are vulnerable, lonely or not in a good mental state. The biggest problem I see (personally) is the way in which it heightens our stress levels, which, if at toxic levels can do lasting damage.
Physically, it definitely has the power to contribute to cognitive decline as well, since when we’re inactive for long periods of time, our brains cannot grow and repair in the way they should, just like muscles. But that has a large amount to do with the overall stress in your life and also how active you are (it’s going to cause more damage if you’re sat down all day rather than running around and counteracting your cortisol levels), not just stress from social media.
Mentally, our self-esteem and social standards can be wrecked by seeing what we think is ‘normal’, therefore creating unnecessary pressure for a lot of kids, teens, and adults too. I’m pretty sure this was a problem in the world long before smartphones with magazines and propaganda on TV; but the difference is now it’s so easily and widely available. And the saddest part is, a lot of it is false or fake.
It’s obvious to me and probably to you that social media can do damage, but serious damage? Like, has anyone ever been hospitalized from overdosing on one too many Epic Fail Youtube vids? I guess we can only wait to find that out in the years to come, as our lives and the way we take in information continues to change.
What’s your take on this? Do you think you’d feel healthier if you used your phone more consciously? Think about it; I’d love to know.
