TECHNOLOGY AND MENTAL HEALTH

NEXT: Social Connection and Mental Health

We are in the information age and what this means is that we are constantly exposed to large amount of minute information, decisions, and idea, such as what kind toothpaste to buy, to the chemical composition of each tube of toothpaste, to what Kim Kardashian did last night, to our friend’s latest post from the beach and so on. 

This is not natural and our minds are not meant to process this much information on a regular basis, as a result we are often in a state of being overwhelmed. It is important to understand how our technology affects our mental health so that we can learn to manage this as individuals and as a society. 

The Surgeon General Recently released an advisory on social media and youth mental health.

Technology and Mental Health:  

Nearly 50% of Young adults report that they are online almost constantly. Technology, social media and the digital world have become a significant part of our lives for many reasons both practical and recreational.

Technology can also blur the lines between work and personal life, as employers and employees can be in touch anytime anywhere and this can make it difficult to set boundaries.

Social Media Use and Adolescence: 

There is a strong correlation between social media use and teen depression. The reasons for this is that teens are exposed to too much information, much of which makes claims about how life should be, look, and feel, and in comparing and simply experiencing this, teens become overwhelmed, feel belittled, inadequate, and alienated.

◇ teens who spend more than an hour a day on screens report far more feelings of depression, loneliness and anxiety. Depression rates across the board have been on the rise since the advent of social media and smartphones.

◇ most teens spend an average of nine hours a day using technology!

Technology and Attention: 

Regular technology use breaks down our ability to focus and control our attention, and has resulted in the acute increase in ADHD diagnoses among adolescents in the past ten years. 

When your ability to focus and be present is weak it is more difficult to be involved in, receptive to, and comfortable with what is happening in the real world around you. 

How Technology has Changed Peer Relationships: 

Social Media has come to feel like a necessity for adolescents who often feel more isolated staying off the apps than being on them. 


Advisory from the U.S. Department of Health on Social Media and Youth Mental Health: States that social media is a significant factor in the major mental health struggles of youth in America. 

The statement concludes that the U.S. Department of Health considers social media and technology use to be unsafe for children and youth and suggests strategies to mitigate harm to these groups. 

◇ 97% of American youth between ages 13-17 use some form of social media: ⅔ report using it everyday and ⅓ report using it almost constantly. 

◇ Teenagers on average spend 3.5 hours a day on social media.

◇ 46% of teenagers state that using social media makes them feel worse. 

◇ This level of use is associated with depression, anxiety, and body image issues.

It is essential to learn healthy habits and strategies for relating to social media and technology. 

Social Media as Coping Mechanism: 

Social media use is often a habit that evolves when you are trying to cope with something challenging, and the coping mechanism continues after its time of being useful and becomes a negative habit.

◇ consider when and why you go to pick up your phone

◇ consider how often you pick up your phone

◇ consider how it makes you feel after you have engaged with your phone and social media

◇ try interrupting these behaviors: when you feel the impulse to pick up your phone, try replacing the action with a new one, such as taking a sip of water or taping your fingers.

◇ challenge yourself to resist the impulse and build new habits.

It is important that we all check in with ourselves about our relationship to technology from time to time, as these habits can often sneak up on us. It may be that we need to have regular periods of actively managing our social media and technology use.

Technology Addiction: 

Technology addiction is frequent and obsessive use of technology and social media despite negative consequences to the user. This can mean impacting the users mental health, impairing their relationships, their academic performance, their ability to work, and so on. 

◇ Technology addiction is not uncommon, and this is due to the  fact  that technology and social media are designed to cultivate addiction. 

◇ This is because users’ attention is how technology and social media profits: the more a user is online, the more advertising they can be exposed to, thus the more advertising revenue for the social media platform. 

◇ Technology and social media are highly addictive and can affect us in the same way that controlled substances such as drugs and alcohol do, by stimulating the pleasure centers in the brain. 

Technology, like controlled substances, can provide an escape from reality, which is perhaps challenging, overwhelming, lonely, confusing, or inadequate in ways which users feel powerless to address.

Ways of Preventing Technology Addiction:

◇ Finding ‘highs’ meaning moments and experiences that bring you joy, without technology such as dinner with friends, making a personal record running a mile, playing chess, drawing and any manner of other rewarding activity which does not require technology.
◇ Developing healthy ways of managing stress, such as taking the dog for long walks or cooking, and balancing productivity oriented activities with more relaxed or open-ended ones.

◇ Developing active relationships to interests such as making pottery, playing soccer, working with children, or anything else that helps you to build a sense of identity in the real world. 

◇ seeking help when your relationship to technology is something you need or want to change but cannot do so alone. 


Signs of Technology Addiction

◇ If you or a loved one are experiencing adverse effects from your technology usage, but continue to use technology in the same way, to the same degree.

Adverse effects can be anything from emotional stress, to body image issues, to impaired sleep, to difficulty focusing, to overstimulation, and more.

◇ If you find yourself concealing, lying about or mischaracterizing the amount and the manner in which you use technology. 

Breaking a Technology Addiction: 

Breaking a habit or an addiction requires a plan, strategy, and patience. 

◇ Begin by listing all of the things that you turn to your smartphone, computer, social media or other form of technology for, such as: entertainment, friendship, navigation, music, etc.

◇ Next list what you actually need it for: such as communication, navigation, time. Now make a firm decision to identify your phone or technology with one or two select purposes, such as communication, rather than the many uses for which you were turning to it.

◇ Now figure out how you can accomplish the other tasks which you were turning to your phone for through other means. Such as friendship: try setting up a weekly pizza night with friends, try finding entertainment in activities such as cooking, dancing or reading, etc.

◇  Now remove all apps and tools on the device unrelated to the primary purposes you have chosen, so in this case everything not related to communication, so removing apps like netflix, instagram, hulu, games and so on.

◇ Make using your device less easy to use in various ways, such as by setting a long and complicated password which you have to type each time to enter the phone, or set time-limit reminders to appear after 5 minutes of use, and so on.

◇ Allow yourself some phone time or activity on the phone, but it measured doses; maybe you allow yourself to use instagram for 15 minutes a day, or for a half an hour on fridays.

◇ Work incrementally, set manageable expectations and goals for each week and work toward your goal of better technology habits slowly, with patience and forgiveness.