How Social Media Is Affecting Our Mind

 

How Social Media Is Affecting Our Mind

Social media, which started out as a passing fancy, today is transforming the manner in which we interact and share. It's frankly hard to escape it. Today, we're on social networking sites like Facebook and Instagram all the time.

This has had an effect on our ability to process information. Brain imaging studies show that while we scroll through Instagram posts and tweet about what we're doing, the brain becomes less perceptive to environmental stimuli - it even generates physical changes in its activity. When two people are texting each other, less brainpower is used for processing conversational tones from facial expressions, tone of voice etc.

We have been changing our interaction with social media from one where we peruse the content but stay apace with external events to a situation where we feel a compulsive need to 'check in' all the time

How Social Media Is Affecting Our Mind

It's an interesting trend, especially when we think about the idea of information overload. The problem is that we're being given more information, but we're becoming less capable of processing it all.

In other words, we're living in a hyper-stimulated environment. We're flooded with information that we're not really able to process and we have become passive receivers of this information. We have to learn to become active consumers and producers of this information.

But, how do we do this? We have to be aware of how much information we're getting and how much time we're spending absorbing this information. We have to make conscious choices about how we use this information.

How to Use Social Media Consciously

It's a difficult thing to get used to. In fact, it's downright frightening at first.

But the good news is that, like anything, if we practice, we'll get better. There are things we can do to help us become more mindful of the social media that we're using.

Distract Yourself From the Distraction

People aren’t usually motivated to change their social media use by simply hearing it’s bad for them. It’s better for individuals to see what their limits are. It’s probably unrealistic for most social media users to quit completely. However, they can monitor their behavior to see how their use impacts them, and how to act as a result.

For example,Michelle knows this all too well. When she was initially treated for anxiety, her therapist asked her if she was active on social media, and she said yes. “It turns out that a lot of my anxiety and impostor syndrome is made worse when I’m online.” A person experiences impostor syndrome when feeling chronic self-doubt and a sense of being exposed as ‘a fraud’ in terms of success and intellect. “Whether it’s another pretty vacation or someone’s bouquet of flowers, my mind went from ‘Why not me?’ to ‘I don’t deserve those things, and I don’t know why,’ and it made me feel awful.”

She and her therapist decided to set ground rules. “If I was to continue using social media, I had to learn what would trigger my anxiety and how using different platforms made me feel,” says Michelle. The result was her deleting Snapchat for good, and after 5 years, she still doesn’t miss it. She’s still active on several other platforms, though.

So put in the points, we can say,

1. Become aware of your own triggers. What is it about social media that makes you feel anxious or depressed? Try to notice when you start to feel negative and how you feel when you are exposed to the digital world. If you know what is causing you to feel down, you can change your habits.

2. Be selective. It’s okay to filter. You don’t have to be online at all times. When you do use social media, be selective about what you share. Look at your posts. Are you sharing a picture of a group of friends and then immediately writing a post about how you’re sad about a breakup? Are you posting pictures of yourself or your friends that make you feel bad about yourself? Instead of posting about a relationship that ended badly, share about a trip you had that went well.

The study’s researchers looked at 143 undergraduates randomly assigned to two groups. The first set was asked to limit Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat to ten minutes per platform per day, while the second was asked to continue to use their social media as usual for three weeks. The limited group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression during those three weeks over the group that continued using social media.

A 2018 University of Pennsylvania study suggests that such self-monitoring can change one’s perception of social media.

Sperling encourages people to conduct their own behaviour experiments by rating their emotions on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the most intensely one could experience an emotion, before and after using social media sites at the same time each day for a week. If one notices that one feels less happy after using them, then one might consider changing how one uses social media sites, such as using them for less time and doing other activities that one enjoys instead.

Conclusion

When it comes to social media, you can’t escape it. It’s unavoidable. However, you can manage your time on it to make sure you’re not spending too much time on it. When you start seeing a negative impact, it’s time to make changes. If you follow the above mentioned measures and the conclusions of the studies, you can definitely beat your habit of scrolling social media and especially you are scrolling it mindlessly it can be have serious impacts.

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