ASM145 Social Media and Mental Health

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well hello everyone uh you'll notice that it is not monday uh so athlete's mike is is late and there's no theme song what's going on well here's what's going on i've been traveling a lot i got back i got busy working on some episodes of the liturgist podcast and some projects for the liturgists and uh science might got bumped a couple of days which was fine i was gonna catch up and then my daughter got sick with the stomach flu and i lost a lot of time there so instead we're gonna we're gonna shift a little bit and we're going to talk about something that has been on my mind and that's the relationship between social media and mental health and uh when i uh late last year asked you what you thought about the podcast and what you would think about changing the format what i got overwhelmingly was that people like the format as it is that you like the mixture of live episodes and studio episodes but that you'd like me to also do episodes sometimes where i just talk about what i'm thinking about or books i'm reading and so this episode is going to be that out of necessity because the normal studio episode this week is full of questions which are extremely difficult to answer and that uh i've probably spent double the amount of research i spend in a normal studio episode i'm still nowhere near happy with my answers to this question so instead we're going to talk about something that i hope is deeply meaningful and resonant in your life today and that's social media i mean have you noticed that we're a bit obsessed with social media uh and then let's let's be clear right off the bat i understand that poo pooing social media is very common what i'm about to say i don't mean from a a luddite perspective or a fear of technology i also want to say they understand you know social media is incredibly empowering uh social media helps people organize literally organize revolutions uh it's helped us connect this audience i care so much about this group of people who are going through faith transition many of us would would not be able to connect with people in our face-to-face real-life communities for fear of rejection and social media and digital media allows these connections to form so all of what i'm about to say is in conjunction with the understanding that of course there are tremendous benefits to digital and social media of course people who are homebound or who are on the autism spectrum or who in some way find it stressful or dehumanizing to interact with people in normal face-to-face contacts are empowered by social media i'm not in this episode saying that social media is bad or evil or wrong or should be avoided what i'm talking about is some dis disturbing research discouraging and disturbing research about social media and mental health and i've been thinking about this for a while i'm going to link to a piece in the atlantic that i think summarizes the problem very well that includes some research on things like the instagram effect so if you're on instagram you look on instagram what you usually see are pictures of people having their best life living their best life beautiful locations uh nights out with friends but we understand statistically that people are spending more and more time alone and more and more time home especially millennials and post-millennials the two youngest generations in the united states and people are spending more time at home and yet they look on their phone and they see what their friends exploring the world they see their friends going to parties and that tells their brain that they're weird and they're alone and everyone else is having a good time and um it's not good what we're understanding though is is these these machines these algorithms have been designed to share information with us and the information they want to share is whatever captures the most attention and smiling faces and people having a good time capture attention as do things that make us very angry and suddenly social media makes sense anything that stimulates your emotional brain and captures your attention gets you to look longer to share to like to comment uh it trains a machine to show it to you more which means even if you don't go out very much when you do you what you post your best life on instagram and then all of your friends who are home alone enter this cycle of loneliness what does that look like well let's talk about some long-term behavioral trends in the data in 2015 56 of high school seniors went on one or more dates now that's compared to 85 percent in boomers and generation x so this is a huge huge shift in human behavior high school seniors are dating less now that has led to a teen birth rate that's at an all-time low and high school sexual activity is down 40 percent many people would say that that is good not everyone but many people would say that is an encouraging bit of data [Music] another thing that's kind of interesting and related to this research millennials and post-millennials wait longer to get driver's licenses than previous generations did which is driven by anxiety so what we are finding is that anxiety is skyrocketing among millennials and post-millennials as they are spending more time on social media and here's a quote from jean twinge which i will share her piece in the atlantic on the show notes this week all screen activities are linked to less happiness and all non-screen activities are linked to more happiness 8th graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 more likely to say that they are unhappy than those who devote less time to social media and related to that depression in america is at an all-time high and the younger you are the more likely you are to be depressed young people are the most depressed youth we have on record and heavy social media use increases depression risks by 27 and um that's shocking heavy smartphone and tablet users are 35 more likely to have suicidal ideation so the data is clear americans especially millennials and post millennials of which there are many of you listening to me right now are in a digitally induced mental health crisis again i say this knowing that there are many wonderful things about social media but what we are finding in social science and in psychology is that many more people experience overall negative mental health consequences from social media use then there are people who experience overall positive right everyone experienced some mix of positive and negatives for most people the negatives are outweighing the positive research is increasingly clear on this so i wrote a twitter thread and a facebook post that explores that and it's gone bananas so i'll link that in the show notes as well but i thought we would just go through that together because as i've reviewed this research and as i've looked at what researchers are saying about screen time and about social media i have tried to create mitigating strategies in my own life that are evidence-based and i thought i would share them with you some ways to be healthier in our approach of social media this is not about saying you have to abstain from social media this is trying to mitigate those negative impacts on mental health associated with high social media use so here's some things that i have found helpful first i begin by understanding that social media companies have a financial incentive to create products and services that make me act in a compulsive way that this is their financial model facebook makes money when i get a compulsion to respond to the uh on my phone they make they literally make money they become one of the world's most valuable companies monetizing compulsive behavior on smartphones and tablets so if i understand that it means that facebook and i have different goals for my use of facebook facebook wants as much of my attention as they can get to sell as many ads as possible what do i want from facebook i want to see my friends on vacation i want to connect with family members on the other side of a continent i want to connect with all of you who engage my work because you care about science or spirituality or social justice or some combination of those things so how can i make facebook do the job i want it to do without being exploited as a product that they sell advertisers well first of all notifications are a big problem research is telling us that the kind of alert our phone gives us creates a dopamine-fueled compulsive behavior loop dopamine does many things frankly it's a neurotransmitter we don't know all of what dopamine was does but we know one thing that it's responsible for is creating craving and the potential reward of the vibration in your smartphone is is actually more addicting than a guaranteed reward because you might look at your phone and it could be a bill it could be you know a text a spam text there's no telling but it could be that someone likes something you posted and that's that's validation for a social mammal so i've decided it's in my best interest to disable all notifications from every social media program and to be intentional about how often and when i check in on social media if you look at my facebook page and my twitter feed i tend to get on for a few minutes at a time read and post and then go away so i've turned off all notifications on my smartphone all facebook all twitter all instagram you know even if you text me i don't get notified because i'm trying to break this behavioral loop in my life that corporations have created for profit so notifications off i take it a little further uh i put my phone to bed so uh as we get into late evening my phone goes and sits on the nightstand and i'm done with it when i get up in the morning i leave it there until after breakfast so i have phone free time with my family you don't have to do that but i i would say that if you're interested in breaking the dopamine compulsion loop that you likely experienced with your smartphone turning off notifications is a good start another thing social media algorithms the machine learning has discovered that outrage holds attention better than almost any other emotion so when i feel outraged by something i see on social media i take a step back and i process and i think deeply now there's plenty that i could see on social media that is genuinely worthy of outrage but i also understand that chronic moral outrage or an addiction to moral outrage or a craving for moral outrage which is a very gratifying emotion does not actually help me be a better activist or advocate in the world and so i tend to view with caution social media content that makes me outraged also i understand that social media gives me a very limited view of people we are social mammals and our brains below our consciousness below our neocortex are constantly evaluating the facial expressions and the body language of people we talk to that gives us a rich full picture of another person's lived experience that vanishes when people are turned into pictures and texts even if we see someone speaking in video form online the fact that they don't respond to our emotional cues dehumanizes them and dehumanizes us and it's much more amplified in text-based communication so i understand that when people are dehumanized on social media it means conflicts are very explosive and volatile we will say things on social media we would never say to someone's face and person so i work to mitigate this tendency towards explosive con conflict by being intentional about being kind to others when i respond i as often as i can work to de-escalate conflict now i'm a person and sometimes my little mammal brain gets worried that my reputation will be damaged or my social standing will be damaged if i don't engage in a conversation where i'm being um threatened or i'm being uh and i don't mean threatened like i'm gonna get you i mean like my my social standing is threatened someone's saying i'm not a good person so what i've learned to do there is walk away or establish boundaries as necessary we have a tendency to dig in to defend to fight to the death to want to win in every online conversation but research is pretty clear that people aren't terribly persuaded by those types of encounters on social media although one-to-one conversations are incredibly persuasive in person they're not particularly motivating in digital settings so boundaries and walking away to process before returning or walking away entirely are all valid that also means conflict with people that i actually know is is better had outside social media than on social media if i find myself in contact with a family member it's better to call them or meet them to resolve the conflict than to continue to snipe each other in facebook comments or tweets and on the other hand people we don't know at all strangers or people we only know online those opinions or criticism should be built should be held very loosely even if the criticisms have merit or deserve further examination or introspection social media tends to make us obsessed with the thoughts of people we don't know about us like total strangers and we're we're obsessed with what they think while ignoring people in our own homes and workplaces and i don't think that's healthy okay uh okay third third point on my big chart here um is that i've noticed people tend to at least people with a justice orientation tend to seek out people of other ethnicities or sexual orientations or gender identities or political affiliations or ability levels it's just other points of identity on social media and that's good and that's helpful but that's no replacement for real life relationships with people who are different than you are surveys and data tell us that if you're white it's very very likely that your social web is extremely white and so as good as it is to seek out information and advocacy on social media it is also very healthy to seek out those sorts of relationships in real life you may find them more instructive and that they hold you to a greater degree of accountability fourth whenever i feel lonely or depressed or anxious or isolated i understand that research is saying social media often deepens those feelings even if it momentarily alleviates them back to that instagram effect of seeing happy faces when we feel alone even if all of our friends feel the same way we don't know that because machine learning algorithms they don't sell attention by promoting posts where people are vulnerable about their loneliness they get attention by showing smiling faces in beautiful locations so i understand that social media offers me a skewed perspective on what other people's lives are like i understand that what i'm seeing is not the real life of my friends or my family and so while social media is extraordinarily helpful at keeping a high-level view of what may be happening in the lives of others it's an important discipline for me to maintain in-person contact and connections with my friends and with my family now i'm making some assumptions i am able-bodied um although i have a brain injury and gets somewhat overwhelmed in uh mid-size or large group settings i still have a a you know a solid capacity to read and understand the feelings of others in a given environment but in general for most people increasing the amount of in-person face-to-face interaction you have as a ratio of your interactions will be better for your mental health social media isn't bad social media is in fact very valuable it offers marginalized people a powerful megaphone and it allows isolated people and homebound people the opportunity to connect with others like them for people going through faith transitions you can be honest about your struggles without fear of reprisal from people in your religious community who may not understand what you've been thinking about lately but it's critical that we remember social media platforms are not created out of a sense of altruism or activism or public service these platforms were all created with a profit motive and that's not bad but it does mean through the very structure of economic incentives that a winning business strategy is to be exploitive of people's social needs and desires in order to maintain our mental health as individuals and as a society we must start to actively manage our relationships with social media we should control the terms of our relationships with the facebooks and twitters of the world and not the other way around otherwise this mental health crisis will continue in america and in europe and all across the world as we crave a connection with others that we fulfill only superficially with digital avatars and text-based communication if you'd like to see this written out and somewhat summarized you can go to ask sciencemic.com where i will link to my facebook page the irony of talking about limiting social media and sending you to social media is not lost on me but again i'm not saying social media should go away i'm saying we should foster a healthier relationship with social media and keep it as a single part of our overall view of our social connections with others and ideally a smaller part than in person connections and voice to voice conversations thanks for listening everyone i'll talk to you next week