Social Media Is Rewiring Your Brain To Be Lazy, Unfocused, and Sad
In an era of hyper-connectivity, our day-to day whereabouts have become consumed by the need to “keep up.” This doesn’t just mean keeping up with your friends’ life milestones we all oddly have instant access to through Facebook, but instead the smaller, insignificant alerts that compound in their ability to detract us from what actually matters. An inbox that never closes, Slack notifications that don’t know boundaries, text messages that are contingent on your immediate response, and a TikTok feed that demands your index finger for more than just one 20 second clip. They have us hooked.
These short, micro-connections that provide us with instant hits of dopamine are convenient and reinforcing. Instagram scrolling is easy. Getting swarmed into Tik Tok has become a habit. Mindlessly checking your inbox is part of the routine. These apps take little to no brainwork to engage in alongside being a source of instant gratification. We’ve become addicted to gratifying, passive consumption. Our brains struggle to hold an attention span, our focus feels nonexistent, and as a result, our lives feel less meaningful. We’re left with brains that are lazy, unfocused, and sad.
We’re left with brains that are lazy, unfocused, and sad.
Because passive consumption requires little mental load, and we engage with it so readily, our brains have become trained to skim. We have forgotten how to encode. Slow reading no longer exists. Incubating with material is foreign. Our brains have become lazy.
Social media’s stream of uninvited notifications has rewired our brains to hunt for distractions. TikTok’s ability to constantly entertain us with something new with each scroll has made what is mundane and ordinary in everyday life boring and unwanted. Long periods of focus feels impossible to find. Distractions are addicting.
And of course, the ability to be caught up with such insignificant details of other peoples’ lives is hysterical, yet we’ve all fallen for the trap. Social media has convinced us we can control how others perceive us, something that is nonexistent in real life. That ability is addictive, and everyone is left carefully curating their perfect reputation for everyone to see. It’s not real. But our brains don’t know that; we’re left consuming the final drafts of everyones lives, making what is real and ordinary feel inferior.
Humans thrive on deep, uninterrupted flow. The dopamine that follows long periods of focus and delayed gratification is what we need. Social media has trained us to crave the opposite. I don’t know the solution. I guess awareness to it is the first step.
Rant over.
Xx
Nicolette
