Your Brain on Social Media.
“You are what you eat”
We’ve probably all heard the phrase above throughout our lives, know what it means, and have tried to fix our eating habits at some point to help improve our health. But what if we were to go beyond this phrase and say “You are what you consume”- not just the food you eat, but the TV you watch, the things you listen to, the news you read, and the social media you scroll through endlessly on a daily basis. Everything we consume, whether physically or mentally, does in fact impact us and shape our thoughts and actions, whether we are aware of it or not.
It’s obvious that Canada and North America as a whole is struggling with a major mental health crisis. And although we may be quick to point our fingers at COVID, many experts say the rising economic pressure after the 2008 recession and the rise of social media usage may be fueling this mental health crisis we’ve been seeing for the past decade. Children and adults are using social media to self-soothe, but instead are being exposed to things that make them feel worse. We now have a whole generation that is more anxious, more depressed, and less engaged IRL (in real life). Essentially, we are living in a digitally obsessed escape based society.
The consumption of social media is leading to a plethora of issues from depression, anxiety, addictions, lowered self-esteem, bullying (this applies to adults too), and the list goes on. But why is social media so addicting? According to Harvard University researcher Trevor Haynes, when you receive a social media notification, your brain sends a chemical messenger called dopamine along a reward pathway, which makes you feel good. Dopamine is associated with other feel-good things, such as food, exercise, love, sex, gambling, and drugs. That’s why brain scans of social media addicts are similar to those of drug-dependent brains. Introduce variable ratio reward schedules (what they use for slot machines) and our behaviours become more habitual because we can’t predict when the next reward/notification/post will appear. So when you have immediate, unpredictable rewards, in the form of attention from your social media network, for minimal effort (a quick thumb tap or scroll), the dopamine-triggering behaviour becomes a habit.
We are essentially carrying around little dopamine stimulators in our pockets. Our phones not only make us bad at multitasking, but they can also lead to phantom vibration syndrome, which is when you feel like your phone is buzzing even though it’s not (this happens to me all the time).
What if you’re not addicted to social media and don’t think it’s a “you” problem? Even just passively consuming social media (scrolling) has proven to have negative effects. A study followed 5,208 adult Facebook users for over two years, measuring life satisfaction and mental and physical health. They found that all these measures were worse with greater Facebook usage, and the way people interacted with Facebook (e.g., passive or active use, liking, clicking, or posting) did not seem to have an influence. Researchers say that the sheer exposure to the carefully curated images from others’ lives is what leads to negative self-comparison.
You may not even realize it as you view others’ beautiful posts and stories, but it can often lead to a feeling of lacking by comparison. In an ideal world, this would fuel admiration, inspiration and in turn personal growth, however it often causes us to feel dissatisfied with ourselves and others. There are two types of comparisons that researchers have identified: upward comparison and downward comparison. Upward is when you compare yourself to others who seem superior to you. Downward is when you compare yourself to others who seem inferior to you. Social media involves more upward comparison (insert IG influencers and celebrities). That’s because people present an idealized version of themselves online. We end up subconsciously comparing our authentic selves to the idealized versions of others. We also compare ourselves to the filtered version of ourselves that we share online. Turns out that upward comparison is worse for our mental health. Although comparing ourselves is part and parcel of being human, and upward comparison can be helpful when it inspires change in positive ways, more often than not, it actually only makes people feel self-critical.
What can we do with this knowledge and how can mindfulness play a part in our social media consumption? Mindfulness will allow you to become aware of how much you consume social media, the effect it’s having on you, and will give you the freedom to choose how you want to engage with it. Instead of going on a complete social media detox, consistent mindfulness practice will teach you how to have a more equanimous relationship with social media. Mindfulness helps you buy time. Have you ever picked up your phone with the intent to send a text or actually do something productive, and instead ended up on Instagram without even being aware of it? Mindfulness can slow you down in those instances, perhaps even before clicking on the app that you weren’t supposed to go on. The skill of mindfulness will allow you to pause and ask yourself “Do I really need this right now?”. Or it will label what you are doing for you (e.g.,“I’m reaching for my phone”). And just that simple pause or labeling of your thoughts will allow you to have more control over your actions.
Here are a few tips to help you get started:
“Clear your feed, clear your mind”: Disable push notifications, put limits on your screen time, and unfollow accounts that don’t serve you. Try to get your feed to look as close to your real life as possible, and always remember that what you see online only reflects a minute fraction of reality. There’s tons of tips at thesocialdilemma.com
Before you reach for your phone, open Facebook, IG, TikTok- whatever your vice is, ask yourself: Am I doing this because it is an absolute necessity or because I need to escape reality right now? A lot of us go to our phones to escape what is happening at the moment. Had a really hard phone call with a client? Okay, let me scroll through my IG feed for a bit. Don’t want to listen to my nagging parents complain right now? Let me shove my face in my phone and pretend I am busy. If you really think about it, there is always a reason we decide to engage in the behaviours we engage in, and 9 times out of 10 it can reveal A LOT about ourselves and what we are lacking in that moment.
Develop a regular formal (sitting) practice: Once you do this, you will notice that eventually between a thought (“I’m bored”) and your response (Reaching for your phone, mindlessly scrolling), a small pause will start to emerge. And in that pause lies your freedom to choose what your next action will be.
I hope you find some of these tips useful while navigating through social media and in general, when engaging with technology. My message is not to avoid social media like the plague, but to be more mindful of your usage and become more aware of its impact on your own life. We need to wake up and realize what we are consuming. We need to begin making conscious decisions about the role we want social media and technology to play in our lives. More powerful technologies are just around the corner, and if we use them wisely, they can be beautiful gifts to our humanity. But, if we approach technology mindlessly, we run the risk of being consumed by them.
Before I end off, I want you to ask yourself this question:
Am I the product OR am I going to engage mindfully with the product?