There are some negative effects of social media on mental health, let's look
into that today.
Social media has become a big part of our lifestyle, our culture,
it affects us too and there's a lot of studies that
haven't even been done yet in other words, we don't know yet the full effect
of social media on our mental health, on our relationships, on other aspects of
our life and I anticipate that over the next several years we will be seeing
more about that. We already know a few things. I had a guest here not too long
ago, James Garrett, and you can link to my video with him right up there where he
shared with us that there are two modes of brain functioning so we have, the
brief version is we have this executive functioning that's centered in the
prefrontal area of our brain, this is where we pay attention to things and we
accomplish tasks and we think things through, it's all about logic and reason
and problem-solving, that executive functioning part of our brain and then
we have another mode that's going on in our brain that's really more creative.
James referred to it as mind wandering which sounds like your brain's not doing
anything, well it is doing something but it's a very different mode of
functioning that gets out of the prefrontal part of your brain and into
the parts that are more creative or playful, he also compared this brain
functioning to the cellphone battery. You know, you get that little icon on your
cellphone that tells you how much juice you have in your battery and some parts
of our functioning diminished that and other parts recharge it. Something that
we found out about social media is when you go to your social media feed and
you're swiping through and you're checking things and you're responding to
things, it actually requires that pre frontal part of your brain to do that so
instead of giving ourselves a break, we're actually continuing to diminish
the energy of our brain as we engage that executive functioning mode of our
brain. Now that's neither good nor bad but the
thing is usually when we go to our social media, let's say that you're at
work, okay, and heaven forbid you're wasting your
employer's time, right. But you know how sometimes you just get tired and you
want a little break so you go to your social media feed on your phone or on
your computer. The whole point that we were making in that other video is this
does not replenish your brain, this doesn't recharge you like say a
brisk walk might or taking a nap which is actually a good brain healthy thing
that you can do, it continues to diminish so it's not the kind of break that
you're looking for. When it comes to mental health, we want to look at some
other things that might affect our mental health related to social media
and one of those I'm going to call the evaluation trap. Your mind has to
evaluate things and notice that you're constantly doing this, you're constantly
judging yourself, you're judging your job, you're judging your family, you're
judging your finances, you're judging me. Okay, I'm judging you too. We do this all
the time, right? We're constantly evaluating. In social media, we have a
constant exposure to standards. Now I'm just going to use that word standards as
a way that we come up with images that we can compare against to do our
judgment. What you're going to notice in social media is that people tend to post
whatever they choose to post and it's not always an actual reflection of
reality, it's simply a selection from their experience or their images or
their life that they have chosen to put up there
intentionally. Now here's the trap. We start to compare our weaknesses to their
strengths. Have you ever noticed that you do that? So this is a pitfall and it can
take your real hit on our mental health. Okay, now let's go to relationships for
just a minute and this is something that you've probably noticed. Have you ever
been in a restaurant for example and you see two people sitting at the same table
with each other and they're both doing what I call the cell phone prayer. You
know, the cell phone prayer where your hands come together and you bow your
head and you're looking at this thing, you've got a person with you and you're
connected to your device. Social media has a tendency to draw us in where
we're focused here instead of here with the person that we're actually with so
it becomes a substitute for a real connection with an actual person. Put
down the device and connect with the person. Now here's another one that comes
up that probably pertains mostly to young people but not necessarily because
I've seen examples with other people as well and that is the potential for
cyberbullying. This is where social media can be used as a platform for actually
bullying another person and there have been all kinds of cases that have been
reported where children especially in a school environment for example will be a
target of bullying through social media and it leads to very negative and
unpleasant consequences for that youth and also for the other people who
are connected to them. There have been some studies that have suggested, going
back to the evaluation trap that I mentioned earlier, when we make that
judgment, that evaluation of ourselves based on a standard that we found on pinterest,
on Facebook or on Instagram, it tends to have a depleting or diminishing
effect on our confidence, our self-esteem, how we judge or evaluate
ourselves even if it's positive. Now this might surprise some people but I've seen
that this is true with some of my own experience. When we see on social media
for example that we're better off than someone else, it tends to have a negative
effect just like when we see that we're worse off than someone else. This is kind
of weird and it might be backwards from what we've learned in actual
face-to-face interactions and relationships with people. It seems that
that extra layer of social media and that distance that we have from it tends
to make the evaluation more of a problem even if it's positive. That surprised me
a little bit to find that out. There's been a lot of talk in recent years about
addiction and how social media might lead to addictive patterns, this is also
true in gaming which might be even more addictive because of the way the game is
designed to keep someone's attention and keep them engaged in that activity. We
see it with social media too. For example, every time someone likes your post, you
get a little bump, a little shot of dopamine into your system, that's the
feel-good chemical, that's the one that makes you feel satisfied and happy. When
you get a notification, let's say that your phone is in your pocket or it's
sitting off to the side or something and you hear that little buzz, okay, a little
notification, it tends to give a little bump of cortisol which is a whole
different chemical, this is the stress chemical and it's because it's an alarm,
it's an alert, it activates your system to attend to whatever it was, you don't
even know yet if it's a thumbs up or a thumbs down, you just know that you need
to attend to it and that causes a little state of alarm. It's not huge but it's
enough that when it's repeated over time, it tends to have an impact on how you
feel. Does social media have an effect on mental health? Yeah, it does. We don't even
know all of the ways that it does yet but let's pay attention to what we do
know to see if we can get on top of that a little bit more. I thought it was kind
of ironic that we're talking about the negative effects of social media on
mental health here on my youtube channel but I'm glad you did. I'm hoping this is
helping you.
you