Are we mentally suffering from too much technology
With Mental Health Awareness Week being promoted across all social media platforms I started to think about the effects, both positive and negative, that the very means of promotion is having on what it is promoting.
Scrolling through social media is nice way to keep up with what’s going on in the world around us, friends, family and wider, but what we see is not reality.
The glossy perfect lives posted online ignore the struggles of life we all face, we tend to post our best times and hide the hardships.
Only seeing this side of others’ lives can be beneficial but also very detrimental to our mental health.
We look at people’s best times and imagine that that is their life everyday, we can look at our lives as mundane and lacking, that is something that can have serious impact on our mental health.
It can be especially destructive to teenagers, at a time they are trying to find themselves they are bombarded by images of perfect people living perfect lives.
It can be much harder for them to see past the filters and photoshop and realise that the people they see are an advert, selling them the latest product.
It is not real, it is the equivalent of an old Calvin Klein advert selling them a dream.
Another issue facing our youth is the Tiktok style entertainment that is prevalent.
They are being fed small dopamine hits in quick succession, something that can lead to activities enjoyed before being less enjoyable as their brains are used to this quick near constant fix provided online.
It is not only the youth that suffer from this, have a think how often you sit down and actually just watch a TV show without checking socials.
I know they are both a form of entertainment but why do we need both at the same time.
Are we suffering mentally from technology?
Is it one of the causes of the current mental health crisis?
Are we just more aware of mental health?
I will leave that up to minds far greater than mine to answer those questions, all I can say is maybe turning your phone off for a bit each day might help in some way, it can’t hurt surely.