Social Media and Mental Health (Episode 91)

Brent and Janis look at the powerful impact of social media in our culture, the potential negative effects it can have on each of us, and ways we can manage it well to garner the benefits without being negatively impacted. 

Transcript:

Welcome to Life and Love Nuggets, where licensed therapist Brent and Janice Sharpe share how you can thrive in your life, your love, and your relationships. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Life and Love Nuggets. Brent and Janice Sharpe, I think that's who we are, right?

I think we are. Yes. I don't know, it's been a long day already, but I think that's who we are. So we're really glad that you're with us today. Yes. Yeah. We're going to talk today about social media, which those of you who know us are probably laughing because we do so little social media.

We are on Instagram. But there is a reason for that. At the time that MySpace came out and Facebook came out, I said, between people I went to high school with, people I went to college with, and clients and church members, I'm not sure I could keep straight who's who. And I worried as a therapist that it would be inappropriate to have people on my Facebook. So I just solved it by not doing it. And so that's okay. But we're going to start this morning talking about smartphones.

I know we've already talked about that before, but we had a wonderful opportunity to attend a seminar on social media and mental health. And we just came across some additional information that we thought would be good to share with you guys. Mm-hmm. So as we look at this, and the reason we're kind of starting with cell phones is that's how everybody accesses. Right. Generally, that's how we use that or tablets. Yeah. It's interesting.

We walk out into our lobby at the counseling center and everybody's looking down at their phones and not looking at each other at all. Even couples that are in, they're just both looking at their phones. And so we shouldn't be surprised that the U.S. has the highest smartphone usage rate in the world, that 82%, a huge amount, 82% of the population has smartphones. And this was pretty staggering. 97% of adults aged 18 to 29 and 40% of children, 8 to 12, have smartphones and use them at least four to five hours a day. That's like a third of our waking hours.

It's going to have an impact on us. Yeah. And smartphones are so much a part of our lives. We do almost everything on our phones. I order meals, DoorDash, thank you very much. Groceries at restaurants, sometimes you need to use a QR code to take a look at the menu. Even our church bulletin, we can now use a QR code to get all the information that we need.

We use them for communication. We use them for entertainment, information sharing, obviously, shopping. I've heard of people shop online.

I don't know. Really? Yeah. I've heard that there's real satisfaction. You're really highly skilled at that. I am very gifted. Highly gifted.

I'm the procurer general of our family. Let's go back to our topic. I can sit at a stoplight and start my grocery order. Or I can tell you that I'm running late. And if you have a teenager, you can know exactly where they are all the time. So I use my phone all the time. I get recipes.

I use the timer on it when I'm cooking something. I use the timer on it when I'm exercising. There's so many things. Most of us use it for our alarm clock.

So phones aren't evil. There's some real good, real benefits in it. But. But as we've talked in a previous podcast, they can affect our relationships. We've talked about this idea called phubbing. P-F-U-B-B-I-N-G. You phubbed me.

You phubbed me. We still joke about that. When we are snubbing somebody with our phone, that we have our phone out and it's basically saying, my phone's more important than you are. And I thought one of those, again, I'm kind of repeating ourselves a little bit from a previous time. One of the fascinating studies that stood out to me was just having a smartphone on the table, even upside down, between us and another person has found to create a disconnect. That there's that sense that that thing is between us. One survey with smartphone users, and this was to me staggering, and it just caused us to go, okay, wait a second, we need to pay attention to this.

It said, and this is self-report, 47% of all people, self-report, half the people said that they are addicted to their phone. They use that word. If we ask spouses, it would be even higher. Probably so. And an addiction is this persistent use of something despite substantial harm and adverse consequences. So they would report that I'm addicted to this. 71% say they spend more time with their phone than they do with their romantic partner.

44% report not having their phone creates anxiety if they can't find it or have misplaced it or left it at the office, that they feel this real anxiety overwhelming them. And this is pretty staggering that 20%, one in five car accidents now is caused by cell phone usage. And so pretty huge thing going on here that we got to pay attention to. And so for adolescents, it is primarily used for gaming and social media. Half of kids, this is another staggering statistic, say that they are on social media almost constantly. After 2022, after we came through the pandemic, twice what it was in 2015. So just seven years later that it's twice as high.

So again, it's becoming a thing. It is.

And I think many of us, if not most of us, do tend to be on our phone too much for one reason or another. I'll say guilty. There's more and more research since so many kids use their phones for social media. There's more and more research that's showing the harm of social media, but especially on kids. Now I'm also concerned about other ages and I'm concerned about senior citizens that spend too much time, you know, scrolling through the news or getting a lot of misinformation that way. But it's, it's hard. We're all somewhat attached to our phones.

It's hard to really assess what social media is doing to us personally. I heard somebody say, you know, trying to figure out how this is impacting us is kind of like asking a fish what water is like, what's water's impact. It's just a part of everyday life. And for kids, it really has been because it's all they've known. They've been using their phones and their tablets and social media. Now there's good things about social media. You know, I'm hearing more and more people that are getting on support groups online and they're people from all over the country generally, but with their particular issue, they can have that sense of support, could not have happened.

And, and there's a sense of, I'm not going to run into you in the grocery store. So I can be real. I can be authentic with you. There's more and more people that are doing online therapy. And sometimes people who won't go to therapy in an office will connect with somebody online. And so there's been a lot of good things. Information on mental health has been out there. That's good.

Social media is good in that it lets people connect with their families, people that are far away. They can see, you know, grandma can see pictures of the kids and everything that they're doing and you can stay more connected with family. And family were in the Bahamas the last few days and we saw real time photos and it was awesome. And wanted to be there. But we know that there's some things about social media that are harmful as well. Trolling, misinformation, scams, catfishing, fake news, comparison and competition. There's so much about comparison with how you look, how you live and everything else.

I mean, there's nothing like going on Instagram to make you feel like your life is dull, messy or you're really not doing anything right. I've never thought about wanting a yacht before. Are they showing up on your Instagram? Somehow recently I started getting all these billionaire yachts. And oh my gosh, it's like wow, that must be nice. I didn't get it for Mother's Day, so I guess it's not something you're going to pull the trigger off. Okay. Well, we've got all of that comparison and let alone, and you don't look good enough either and no matter how much you work out, you're not fit enough.

And our huge concern is that kids don't keep in mind that when something's on the Internet, it is there forever. And so oftentimes people are making mistakes by posting something that they don't want somebody that they're going to a job interview with to see some of the things that are online. So obviously good and bad and pluses and minuses here. The biggest problem is it's kind of obvious is just when it's used in excess. And so how do we use this appropriately? Just a couple of years ago, probably a year and a half ago now, the APA, American Psychological Association, a health advisory warned of the effect of excessive social media on children and adolescents during those formative years. Again, while recognizing, the APA recognized not all social media is bad.

Again, we're not saying it's evil, but said the potential risk to mental health are so much greater from early adolescence to early young childhood. There seems to be three platforms, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram account for 87 percent of teen usage. Thirty seven percent of teens say they spend five or more hours a day on social media. Fourteen percent says between four and five hours, 26 percent two to four hours and twenty three percent less than two hours. Teen boys are more likely to use Twitch, which I don't even know what it is, Reddit and YouTube. Girls are more likely to use TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. And if I remit Snapchat, I don't know what Snapchat is.

Yeah, it's a new thing. Who knows? We could invent it. We'll see what happens. Oh, gosh. And I think that study that you referred to said it even goes into young adulthood. Yes. The impact on people.

So those are very sobering. I thought it was really interesting in the study. They talked about kids who are going through puberty, which they're kind of a wild mess of hormones at that point. Anyway, they're the most vulnerable to social to mental health issues due to social media. So the studies are showing that higher use of social media for girls, for girls. OK, girls who have a high usage of social media. I really need lunch.

Yes, they have much higher issues and much higher incidence of depression. So just looking on social media, spending too much time on it can really. Back to the whole comparison thing. It's true. And what a time in our life going through puberty. So that is just the highest. Yes. And for girls, that's age 11 to 13.

For boys, it's a little bit later. It's 14 to 15. But those times, they're especially vulnerable and we need to be aware of it. Girls especially are looking at people on social media who are presenting as perfect. And they end up being dissatisfied with the way they look, even that young. I'm hearing them even 10 and 11 that aren't happy with something about the way that they look, which leads to depression and anxiety and eating disorders. A doctor, Twinge, did a study in 2020 and in his study, he indicated that it's an urgency to get social media out of middle school in ages when it harms them the most.

So anything they can do to keep kids from being on social media in those middle school years. So overall here, again, we're given lots of statistics and stuff, but overall, studies have shown that an excessive amount, and again, that's still kind of being studied, you know, what that means, can lead to social withdrawal, obviously, if we're now just connecting online. I mean, how many times do we hear people say, well, my teenager just stays in their bedroom, especially boys, and game all day? A reduced face-to-face interaction, so it limits the power of those kind of connections. But again, not just in teens, we see this a lot in older folks, you know, and creating social isolation, they just don't tend to get out as much. It's causing for some sleep deprivation, where just the hits of all the images and stuff that can interrupt the natural sleep cycle. You know, I always say that we're creating an ADD culture, you know, it's, we're seeing more and more attention fragmentation, you know, just hard to keep focus for very long, and which if you look at social media, the, you know, it's on for just a few seconds, and it goes off.

And so, even if we don't have that naturally, it's kind of training that, you know, in us. A shortened attention spans, a spans, increased stress. Boy, we're really good with our words today. We should have had lunch. It's a busy, busy day. And just the anxiety that's created with this always-on culture. Um, which we see, again, across all ages.

And then the famous FOMO, just the fear of missing out. We look at what everybody else is doing, and then if we're not paying attention, maybe there's something that happened that I didn't know about, and so I missed out. Yes, or I didn't get invited, and those are my friends. And that happens to people of all ages. Yes. And so, just talk about the, again, the negative mental health impact that can have. Yeah, we've gotten to the point where we're compulsively checking our notifications.

How oftentimes in counseling does somebody pick up their phone and look at it and go, never mind, and put it down. But all of us do that. It's very easy to go, oh, what'd I miss? I had 10 notifications I missed while I was doing that. It reduces our productivity. We spend a lot of time checking our phones. As we talked about, we have unhealthy social comparisons and stress.

There's such a thing now as social media burnout. To me, it seemed like it might be a good thing, because you wouldn't be on it, but it is a concern, and it does. It diminishes our real-life interactions, because we spend so much time on social media, and especially some of our teens, because they're sitting in their room interacting on social media, but they're not getting out and actually meeting face-to-face with people. Mental and physical health issues include anxiety, depression, and I loved how they put what we were just talking about, the perfect life. This particular author said, overexposure to curated and unrealistic portrayals of life leading to feelings of inadequacy. That's part of what we're talking about. There's a strong correlation, as we've said, between social media and mental health disorders.

Now, we do get to talk about how to help this. How do we fix this? We're not going to talk about doom the whole time.

Right, no, no, yeah. But if we talk about the amount of deep-seated insecurities that we see that people deal with, and again, we see so many people that aren't even aware that their behavior is acting out of insecurities. They wouldn't ever say it that way. They're not acting like they're insecure, but it really comes out of that deep sense of, I'm not enough or not okay or failed or whatever. This just is fanning the flame of that, you know. So the question in the culture right now, and as we study this, is, is it a habit? Is it dependence?

Is it addiction? It's hard to tell. At this point, there's no official diagnosis for social media or cell phone addiction. I think we're getting closer to that, probably. In the field, where it's probably going to show up in our Diagnostic Manual pretty soon, but we're just kind of in that interim where we're trying to do enough studies to confirm it. The thing is, it's easy, quick stimulus, and so it, how fast, it's probably the quickest thing that we can do to get some kind of a stimulus. And it becomes a dopamine hit that's pleasurable.

And yet, it doesn't bring long-lasting satisfaction because, again, it's curated. It's a bit of fantasy. It's not always real, you know, real there. And so there's a need for more, more quickly. There's a need for more of the hit. So it does have these addictive qualities to it. So we get the hit, which is the dopamine is one of the main chemical pathways for feeling positive.

So we see something novel or enticing or stimulating in some way, and the brain... Shocking. The brain releases dopamine into the system. And you know, it's this impulse, this positive, you know, response. But again, it's fabricated. And so it doesn't last as long, so we need more, more quickly. And so we get into this, can lead to dependence because we need greater and greater hits over time to meet the requirement.

And it just, it's so easy to access all the time. And so there's this loop, what's called the dopamine loop, where we get a hit of dopamine. The satisfaction isn't long-lived, it's just a few moments. So it leads to cravings, increased cravings, which leads to some mood changes, irritability, whatever. Decreased motivation, which leads to the need for more dopamine hits. And it's given rise to what we call kind of a dopamine culture now, which is that we are so used to being stimulated consistently that we've developed an intolerance for boredom. And this isn't just kids. No. You know, I mean, this is all of us.

If we can just get the next little dopamine hit, the next little stimulant, and I can pick up my phone to do that or go on my computer real quick, it, again, we just see where this is going. And so it can take on some things that look like addiction, for sure. So how do we deal with this? Well, we just fix it, honey. Okay. So tell us. Okay. We do all have to monitor how much time we spend online.

It's just so easy to just keep looking and looking and looking and looking. One exercise that was recommended in the seminar that we went to that I think is useful is if you find yourself constantly reaching for your phone, and if you start to be more aware of it, you'll be surprised how often you reach for your phone. Now, again, you may be able to tell your spouse they're reaching their phone too much, but you always have a good reason for it, right? Of course. So the exercise they talked about was stop. So just stop it. Stop it.

Stop is S-T-O-P, and it's a mindfulness practice. And so when you start to reach for your phone, you stop, then you take a breath. So we'll talk more, but we've talked a lot about breathing, structured breathing. So take a deep breath in and out. Let yourself relax. Observe what's going on around you. Take it as a mindfulness time.

I was just at the dentist this morning, and the dentist was going to be a little bit, and so I'm like, should I go get my phone from my purse over there? And then I was like, no.

You know what? This is a time to stop, relax, listen to some of the people around you. You could hear somebody washing windows, the squeegee that was going on.

Just observing, yeah. I was observing.

And then if you want to, then you go, okay, I do need to look at my phone because I want to look at a flight for tomorrow. So that's the P, that's the proceed. We proceed. And the idea is we want to break that automatic habit of just reaching for our phone and do something a little bit different. So it's stop, take a breath, observe, and proceed. So it's interrupting that automatic cycle, or we could, you know, we've talked about this just recently is asking yourself, what's the purpose of getting my phone right now? Because it's too easy when you're sitting there and you've ordered food, and I keep to just pull out your phone, but why am I doing this?

It's important to think about that. Yeah. Other things that can help is just you see just notifications and we can use the phone to our benefit. You know, there's, there's a notification that actually tells you how long you've been on it. And if you get embarrassed by that, you're probably on it too much. So again, it's just looking at reality, looking at facing it. There are content filters, and I was looking at this earlier this morning, and you can literally just Google content filters, you know, for social media or phone usage.

And there's just all kinds of things. Do this for kids, certainly teenagers, so that they don't actually get exposed to certain things. But I think also for adults, I mean, there's something that we might be wanting to say, I need to stop looking at that. And so a filter just, you know, actually put it on our phone. Now you can go on and take it off, but that just gives that moment again, the key is that moment of stopping and thinking and not just trying to move away from the impulse of that. And I can't reiterate enough, just this comment you just made about that stopping and why am I doing this?

Why am I grabbing my phone? Is it just, it's there, and so I'm going to grab it and then I'll find something to look at. And we're just saying, instead of that, I see the phone. Is there something I need to do with that right now? And if there's not anything obvious, now we can all open it up and look at the things that we go to, sports scores or the news or, you know, this, that or the other. But what if I stop now? I don't have to look at that right now, you know, and just begin to give some space there.

Well, I think as a whole, we need to have more general mindfulness, being aware, being present. We talked in our last podcast about being present to people, and we have just become so consumed with looking at things that we're not present where we are so many times. And we've talked before about the need for solitude and silence, and boy, that is countercultural when you're looking at the social media life. And so it really is saying, okay, I need to be more intentional about how I lead my life and ask, why am I doing this? But also take some times to go, I'm going to do nothing for a minute. And in this culture, just a minute seems like a long time. If you're sitting in silence, you have to work up to having more time in silence where you have a thought and then you'd let it go.

Another thing that we have to work on is being more socially active. We talk to people on whatever social media app that you're on, but are we really meeting with people personally? You know, you can see somebody, I did this the other day, I saw somebody and found out some things going on in their life, and it's like, you know what, I'm just going to call them and see if they want to have lunch or dinner with us and meet up with them in person so that we can get that face-to-face interaction that we've cut out of our lives so much. Just like addiction, sometimes we need some detox. And so to try some of these practices, you may find yourself having a hard time doing that. You may have your hand on the phone and it's, you know, you're already into it before you even think about it.

So sometimes we need some detox. And so having some zones in your house, we encourage families to get a basket or something that sits on the counter, and everybody, when they come home, they just put their phone in there. Now it's still there if you need to go text somebody or go check on a call or whatever, you can go there and look at it. But just the fact that it's over in a basket now, and it's not in my pocket, or it's not sitting on my knee, or it's not right next to me, just creates again some of that separation. And then some of you may need to do something even more significant than that. So what's called a partial detox. This is a little bit like fasting, but it may be, I'm going to set four hours where I'm going to put my phone away and I'm just going to, whatever I have to do, you know, to get myself not to go check that and not to go look at it.

We've had some people that literally, I mean, this is pretty extreme, but they like, I'm going to do this for 30 days and they just detox and learn how to replace all of that time that was just automatic with that, with other things, you know, and it will create some discomfort, but then we create a different kind of balance in our life. Yeah. I think identifying what I'm doing with my time when I'm on my phone is important because it's so easy to go, Oh, I am doom scrolling. Oh, I've gone to this and this and this and this. And why do I want to know about the trial of that celebrity that I don't even know who they are. So just because it looks like, Oh, that's interesting. So we have to identify how much time am I spending just doom scrolling.

Sometimes I'll tell my clients, you know, five minutes to look at the news. That's it. 10 minutes max if there's something major going on, but beyond that, we're going to go off on bunny trails everywhere and it just wastes a lot of our time. And the other thing is, is there anything I can do in a positive way instead of going to my social media because we waste so much time doing some of that? Do I need to say, okay, I'm going to set an alarm on my checking the news. And then when that goes off, if I want to stay in bed still and read, read a book, read something that is more enriching or some positive things that you can do. You're the master of that.

When you have five minutes, you're washing windows or picking things up or doing all kinds of things. Well, and, and so the idea, I mean, some people may not be able to sit and not look at their phone. Yeah. So you may have to get moving and the, you know, certainly exercise. We're big on that. We encourage that it's the greatest antidepressant on the planet. And so just get moving and do it without the device devices and, and find something to do outside.

I mean, again, we know our kids don't necessarily want to go on the family walk in the evening, but they might want to go to the park or take their bikes, you know, to the park or something like that. You have to get a little more creative, but getting something like that, that's a replacement, you know, I always found raising kids, it was much better to give them an alternative something to do rather than just say, don't do that. And so, um, you know, rather than the whole family just sitting around in chairs, staring at their phones, um, you know, what are some things that we can do together, whether that's sporting events or pottery studios or, you know, hiking, just getting out or like the rest of the world, take up pickleball, you know? And so, so again, whatever it needs to be done, but getting some additional things you can add to your life and just saying, I got to do less of that. What are the things I can add to it? It'll go much easier. Positive things I can add.

So on Mother's Day we played cornhole. I was the one that suggested it. As we were getting ready, I was just going to say, did you get the cornhole out? Did you get the corn? I did. I said that several times to make sure that we had it, um, because I have some great memories of our family playing together and laughing and having fun. And so we got it out.

And what I didn't realize is I'm really terrible at cornhole. I'm like laughing, laughingly terrible, laughably, whatever, terrible. I'm just terrible at it. So I decided, you guys were very nice to me. I thought that it was just this Sunday that I was having trouble with it. And then I was talking to Spencer and he talked about a time that he remembered us playing cornhole and I couldn't get any in. And then at the last minute I got one.

You dunked a few of them. Yeah, let's keep talking about that. My next plan, my next plan is we're going to do croquet as a family, but I think I'm going to get it out and practice for awhile to see how I do before we have any, any of the family over. Another practice that can be helpful when we're trying to put our phones down, our social media down is we're, we are learning more and more about how structured or focused breathing is good for us. And I have people, a lot of times I'll have them do alternate nostril breathing where you, um, you kind of close one nostril. I'm going to talk like this now. You close one nostril, you breathe in through that nostril, you breathe out for the, through the other one and you open it again.

And I found that that really does calm people. But one of the things I recently heard about was left nostril breathing, where you close your right nostril off completely and just breathe with the left side. Hard for people with allergies, but, um, left nostril breathing calms the mind. It encourages creative thinking. It can help us sleep better and it can help improve athletic performance. So I'm going to do that before the next cornhole. Oh, you better watch out.

Yeah, I'm going up a notch, but it really is interesting. If you haven't tried either alternate, um, nostril breathing or just left nostril breathing, I've really seen that it causes a sense of calm and it's such an easy thing to do. You do it five minutes and you find yourself dramatically calmer. It affects in the right hemisphere of the brain, right? The opposite. That's what makes us more creative. Calm and calms it, yeah.

So in summary, again, we could talk about this kind of stuff for a long time. Um, in summary, social media has positive and negative effects on our life. Um, it's these phones and computers can be a huge blessing in our life. Uh, the important thing is to monitor it. And if we could highlight some key things, it would just be knowing the purpose, what's the purpose of what you're going online for, um, what you're looking at or what you're picking up your phone. Um, and, and look to expand other things in your life that may have gone dormant where we just have dependent on this for those constant dopamine hits. And I've kind of gotten addicted to that.

How do we develop other things so that we're just, again, we're not saying don't ever do this. Okay. But how do we, how do we find that balance? Um, um, you know, we often tell clients that are dealing with anxiety or depression to go back in your life, you know, um, for some people, I mean, we can go back and when too long ago there were, there weren't, it wasn't social media. They weren't phone. We can remember childhood and growing up young adults and so forth. And for many people, they can't remember before that, but what are other things that you've that have created joy in your life that are, that create peace and, and just trying to, to get some of those back online, you know, uh, in your life for those are some of the go-tos instead of just depending on this, that doesn't seem to be creating deep, deep satisfaction in our life.

Um, so always be looking for some new things and new things to develop. And so out of all of this, uh, I know that even when we were, when we're developing something like this and looking at this, I mean, there's some things here that's like, okay, I need to think about this, right. You know? And that would be helpful to me to do that. You know, some of those simple techniques. And so hopefully you've gained something here today that you can grab a hold of and begin to implement into your life, um, that can help us thrive at the highest level. So for today, go in peace, blessings as you go.

The Life and Love Nuggets podcast is a 501c3 nonprofit and is supported by gifts from people like you. To donate, go to lifeandlovenuggets.com slash donate. This podcast is produced by Clayton Creative in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The content should not be considered or used for counseling, but for educational purposes only. Transcribed by https://otter.ai