How Social Media is Harming Your Health (and what to do about it)

Stress is your primary survival system and your brain is designed to prioritize survival, emotionally and physically. We’re all trying to optimize happiness but our brain is wired to survive. Which means that one primary function of our brain is to search out threats in our environment. If you were out hunting food in the Savannah, it would greatly benefit you to notice the moving grass or a cracked tree branch to alert you of a predator. Focusing on those possible threats is vital to keeping you alive. 

Let’s start with understanding our stress cycle.

The stress cycle consists of:

1. Stimulus that your mind perceives as a threat
2. Brain and body adjust
3. Response to threat: Fight Flight Fawn or Freeze
4. Stimulus resolves
5. Brain and body move back into a resting state

Social media (and the news) are never ending cycles of steps 1-3. In fact, the algorithms are designed this way. The stimulus is never over. The potential threats are endless and we are exposed to everyone’s threats all over the world. Everything, everywhere, all at once. We might be sitting in our warm home, with a snack, our loved ones next to us, but our brain is tracking threats happening 1000 miles away. Ever notice what most people do when something big and dangerous happens in the news? We plant ourselves in front of 24 hour news and scroll and scroll on our phones. We feel unsafe. We need to be hypervigilant. We are looking for the movement in the grass or the crack in the tree branch. 

What happens to us when we are in stages 1-3?

Mind:

Simply put, the frontal coretex goes offline so our survival brain can take over. Which means our decision making becomes more instinctual. The frontal cortex is responsible for learning, empathy, emotional regulation, problem-solving, attention span, and most of human’s higher level functioning. This can manifest as making impulsive decisions, lashing out at people around you, forgetting things, and generally altering your perception of the world around you. 

Remember that old, unhealthy coping mechanism you thought you’d moved past? It’s back! Anyone else craving pastries lately, or is it just me? 

Body:

Ask yourself, what does it FEEL like when you are stressed. If you said things like tension in your neck, upset stomach, headache, anxiety, and can’t sleep, you’re a normal human. These are all the systems that change in our body when we perceive a threat. Increased heart rate, increased blood sugar, heightened senses, muscle contraction, blood flow re-routes from our digestive tract to the muscles. Remember, we are prepping to fight or to run, so our body is literally shifting our systems to make quick movement possible and survival more likely. 

You might be thinking, “So, are you saying every time I get stressed I should go run a lap?” 

Yes. Yes, I am. 

Ok, it doesn’t have to mean running and it doesn’t have to be in the highest moment of stress but this is a critical reason why exercise of some sort is so important every single day. 

All those physical changes under chronic stress, while remaining sedentary, are what causes the direct link between chronic stress and a decline in health. Sitting all day with higher blood sugar? Can lead to Type II diabetes. Working all day at a desk with increased heart rate and blood pressure? Stress on the heart. Driving with chronic muscle tension? Chronic pain and tightness throughout your body. Hypervigilant mind when you go to bed? You’re likely to miss out on restorative sleep. 

How do we fix this?

Step 1: Get into the present

Turn off the media, put your phone down, and go interact in your world. 

I hope that you are reading this from a safe place: you have food, you have shelter, you have clothes, you have electricity, and you have water. If so, you have an opportunity to feel fully safe in the moment you are in. Show your brain that you are safe in your environment; there is no predator hunting you and it can switch out of survival mode. Connect with the real things around you whether it’s the sun on your face, the sound of the birds in the trees, the feeling of your dog’s fur, or just the weight of your own feet on the earth. These are all things that bring you into the present; a present that doesn’t require your system to be on high alert.

Step 2: Exercise

We covered why above, and no you’re not getting out of it. But there’s no rule to what this looks like or how long you have to do it. Walk your dogs, dance, stretch, do yoga in the park, take up tai chi, join a gym to lift some weights. Whatever is available to you, do some of it every day for however long you’d like. 

Step 3: Cultivate a hobby

Joy and learning are so important to our mental health. Prioritize that practice. Get good at something. Don’t feel you have to share your hobby on social media and don’t turn it into a job.

Step 4: Spend time with people in person, on the phone, or on a video call

I know, I lost some of you at the “talk on the phone”. Trust me, it’s better than texting, not as good as in person. We are social creatures and having other humans around to interact with is vital to our mental health and feelings of safety. Oftentimes, social media gives us the illusion of being social, but we are not meeting all our social needs. We are viewing others from a distance, often without direct interaction. We need to see, hear, and understand others; and we need to be seen, heard, and understood by others.

Step 5: Do the above for however long you need

I’d love to write you a prescription for how much break time you should take or how much exercise you should do daily, but it’s not that simple. We are complex beings with vastly different lives. Start small: 5 mins of movement a day, turn off the phone 2 hours before bedtime, make a coffee date with a friend you haven’t seen in a while. Then, see how it feels. Do you need more time away from the phone? Does one type of exercise feel better than another? Just start noticing your own experiences and honoring how your body and mind feel.