Social Media’s Hidden Costs: Anxiety, Comparison, and Critical Thinking

Social media was supposed to connect us, but has it done more harm than good? This episode breaks down how endless scrolling and highlight reels lead to anxiety, social comparison, and even physical illness. We explore how our brains react to constant comparison with the "perfect" lives of others and why it makes us feel inadequate.

But it doesn’t stop there—social media is reshaping our attention spans, impacting elections, and steering public perception like a puppet master. Learn how fear and outrage drive engagement, and discover practical ways to regain control over your mental health and focus in the digital age.

Chapters

• 0:00 Obsession and the Social Media Effect
• 2:07 Social Comparison and Human Wiring
• 4:38 How Social Media Warps Reality
• 7:35 Rising Anxiety in Gen Z and Millennials
• 10:34 Stress, Illness, and the Digital Age
• 12:04 Social Media’s Impact on Elections
• 15:28 Fear, Outrage, and Emotional Manipulation
• 17:49 Taking Control: Social Media Detox Tips

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

And to obsess on something means to think about it over and over and over again. And it's the internal part of obsessive compulsive disorder, compulsive are the behaviors that people do to try to rid themselves of the troubling thoughts that keep running through their mind. A person's ability to obsess, to ruminate, to brood, is a predictor of how far they're going to go to resentment. Contempt that does change your brain. It increases adrenaline or norepinephrine because you're scanning your environment to become vigilant to threats. And you just you you'll persevere, right? You'll keep going on. And that does change your brain.

Speaker 2: 0:46

So, Roger, tell us a little bit about social media. What do you think it was supposed to be? And what do you think it has become? How did it impact our lives on a day to day basis as it stands?

Speaker 1: 0:58

Well, I have to admit a little bit of ignorance about the actual beginning of Facebook. I haven't watched The Social Network. I haven't read any of the books about the beginning, but there was a time when every college printed up what was called a Facebook, and every college had pictures of everybody you went to school with, and people used that. If they were desperate to get dates. So they would look through and circle the ones they wanted to ask out, and then find out how to ask them out. And that's why it was called a Facebook. And I believe, I believe the original intent was to approach college students so that they could do this same process online. It's really different than that now.

Speaker 2: 1:55

Talk a little bit about how that impacts us on our on our day to day basis. What impact that have on our brains? What does it do to our lives and what's important?

Speaker 1: 2:07

Well, human beings are, human beings are a social animal. And so we engage in social comparison all the time. And human beings, their status in a group indicates more power, more access to resources. Very likely greater longevity. So human beings are wired to seek to understand where they are in a social hierarchy. Am I on the bottom? Am I somewhere in the middle of my safe, or am I on the top? Do I have access to more resources and with it, more vulnerability? More vulnerability for losing that position, more responsibility for, taking care of the pack or the herd? And so what what human beings are built to do is compare ourselves to other human beings. And and when our social circle there's where our social circle was organic, there there is a thing called the Dunbar number. And the Dunbar number is roughly the number of people, you know, on a first name basis that if you saw them on the street, you would stop and say hello. And that number for most humans is about 100, 120. And so human beings would engage in social comparison with their organically created group. So in high school, if you went to a small enough school, that was your whole class, or if it was even smaller than that, that was the whole senior or that was the whole senior high, or high school. So so you knew everybody on a first name basis, and your social comparison was with people who were very much like you. Now, with social media, the social comparison happens with a larger group of people who are demographically, socioeconomically very different than you. And as people who compare ourselves to others, we compare ourselves to the images and the videos that other people display. And no one, no one in the world does. This is what my life is really like on social media. It's always a highlight reel. It's never their bad day. It's never when they look bad. It's, you know, it's it's never when they're clipping their fingernails. It's never when they're, you know, when they're having a bad hair day. It's never that. So it creates a false comparison. So I get on social media, I see somebody who I've never met before, who's better looking, who appears to have more money, who has, you know, greater success and as a result, I feel dissatisfied because I'm comparing myself, my real life, the one that I know with the highlight reel of someone else. And so in terms of social comparison, we go on social media and almost always walk away feeling inadequate that the person I think he has done a really good job of distinguishing these things is, Paul Ekman and Paul Ekman is a guy, who's a researcher on facial expressions. And there's a facial expression of anger, and then there's a facial expression of disgust. And he's he's, expanded that work to, to have a slightly different facial expression for contempt. But if we look at those two is roughly the same, even though they're not exactly the same anger is present tense. So if I'm angry with somebody, I'm angry right now. But to get to contempt, resentment, scorn, bitterness, malice, hatred, you got practice. And here's what happens is, is if I have envy, desire plus resentment, I've got to I, I reverse that resentment. If I'm just angry at you, that evaporates. But that anger can turn to resentment the more I mentally rehearse it. The more I. And I'm going to use a a word here. Not in a pathological way just yet, which is I obsess on it and to obsess on something means to think about it over and over and over again. And it's the internal part of obsessive compulsive disorder. Compulsions are the behaviors that people do to try to rid themselves of the troubling thoughts that keep running through their mind. A person's ability to obsess, to ruminate, to brood is a predictor of how far they're going to go to resentment, contempt, and that does change your brain. It it it it increases adrenaline or norepinephrine because you're scanning your environment. To become vigilant to threats. And, and you just you'll, you'll separate, you'll keep going on. And that does change your brain. There's a there's a lot of good research. Jonathan Haidt wrote a book called The Anxious Generation. And his basic conclusion is that the level of anxiety that we see in young adults and millennials and Gen Z is largely related to the over reliance of their social life dependent on social media. And so we're seeing spikes in levels of anxiety. It's it's a very interesting thesis. I think there's some truth to it is, is social media the only thing that, I'm sorry, our social media, the only thing that creates this anxiety? Probably not. But it's certainly a a large contributing factor that we're seeing higher levels of anxiety. And he argues that children have gone from a play based childhood to a phone based childhood. And what that means is that they've moved from an active childhood where they're playing on the playground with other children, being physically active to sitting in front of a screen, interacting with other people in a sedentary way. So are there health, are there health problems? Absolutely. If we look at the illnesses treated by the standard physician, if you just go into your physician 80% of what your physician treats are stress related illnesses, illnesses caused by, aggravated by, or extended by psychological distress or strain. I mean, dengue fever, no. Malaria? No. Okay. But pretty much everything else migraine headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis, high blood pressure, heart disease, some kinds of cancer, high cholesterol. I mean, I, I, I could continue, but I think you get the point. Most of what diabetes. And then all the mental illnesses, they're all stress related illnesses and and the research about this is so good. So anything that increases our baseline level of stress will actually cause us to get sick. So not only are we mentally unwell as a result of social media, but downstream of the anxiety that we experience and the strain we experience, we have physical illnesses as well.

Speaker 2: 10:34

So the social media impact the ability to think critically.

Speaker 1: 10:38

Yes, it does. The attention span of the average reader has gone from 45 minutes to 30 minutes to 15 minutes to now. It's like 30s and the the movement away in the last few years from blogging, which means writing to vlogging, which means video has been dramatic because people would much rather watch a video than engage in that hard process of reading. So our attention span has become shorter. If we look at a book by Nicholas Carr called, The Shallows, he argues that the advent of technology has changed the human brain from the time of of Homer and the Greeks to the time when people were writing, when they when they went from memorizing things verbally, audibly to writing to writing from papyrus to paper and then from paper writing to the typewriter, then the change in the way we think from the typewriter to the computer and then boom, the, the, the doors blew off when we went to the internet, all of which decreased, decreased, in his opinion, our ability to pay attention for extended length of time.

Speaker 2: 12:05

So what do you think this will do to our upcoming elections? How does social media play a big role here?

Speaker 1: 12:12

If the social media editors put their thumb on the scale about which which stories will be throttled, which stories will not be throttled, it changes the public perception of what is common knowledge and, There was a movie years ago called My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and if you heard this of this movie, if you seen it.

Speaker 2: 12:38

Love this movie. So love it.

Speaker 1: 12:40

It's a fantastic movie. And, the mother of the bride is talking to her daughter, and she says the man is the head, the woman is the neck. And what she means by that is he can point him. He he sees. Right? But the neck directs where he looks. And I love that line, because what it gets at is we think we're seeing. But the social media is the neck, and it's turning our attention to where they want it to go. And we are led by our neck. So I think if there are people in an editorial capacity, whether they throttle the story, where they broadcast the story, which stories, you know, which which content will be filtered out or considered harmful or dangerous. All of those things will change the tenor of the conversation. There's a book out years ago called The New Marathi, and they said that if a social media company had your birth date, your your, your sex and your zip code, they could, with 85% accuracy, identify you in your zip code. Wow, that's three pieces of pretty vague information. Well, they have way more information about us than that, because when we sign up, we give it to them. And so they can target us. They can track us now with, you know, you know, geofencing. Do you know this? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So now with geofencing, if, if I go to a restaurant, they capture my phone, they can track me indefinitely. Yeah, they got a lot of information about me. If I've got if I, if I got my location, set to on for any, any one of the apps on my phone, whoever runs that app can follow me everywhere I go. They know a lot about me. Roger, I just be curious to hear. What do you think is the most successful? Maybe not the best, or the most principled. But, what is the most successful emotion that politicians try to play on or play off of? To get people to get out and vote? Oh, I fear absolutely, absolutely. If you look at the the single most life preserving of all of our emotions, the emotion that drives, the most of our self-preservation, it's fear. So anything that appeals to fear will appeal to human. We'll get human beings going now. Doesn't have to be fear of death. It can be fear of looking foolish. It can be fear of of, making a mistake in whatever anxiety you have about anything, that that's what sells. And I'm absolutely convinced the job of the news media is to scare the hell out of us. That's that's their job. I mean, because they're not going to make money telling happy stories. Those last the we get all of the happy stories in one hour on Sunday morning. And that's because nobody else wants that hour. And so they throw it in there. But we have bad news. You know, eight hours a day on about 57 channels and it's on every day. So we just can't compete. The power of bad, the power of fear is much stronger than the power of good. And there's a wonderful book called The Power of Bad, which which outlines why fear, anger. I'll just leave it at fear and anger. Those drives so much. The other the other human drive besides fear. And then second is anger because you talked about it. It I think you said fear and then outrage. Or maybe that was you, Kim, who said that, that those are those two emotions fear. Fear and, and anger. But the other the other one that sells so much is sexual desire. I mean, that's an incredibly powerful human drive. And, you know, it seems like Instagram. Yeah. I apparently don't follow these people. But apparently Instagram is driven on people, you know, doing sexy self shots and, Yeah, that's sells. I'm not anti social media. I really am not. I mean, I, I have accounts on most of the major, most of the major, social media sites. There's some I like better than others. There's some, you know, I really don't have that much use for, what I would encourage you to do as you're using it is as a, as, I just did this yesterday. Somebody kept coming up in my feed, on one social media site, and I always felt lousy when they came up. I unfollowed that person. And so check your own emotions and and begin unfollowing people if if they, if their posts take you to a bad place. So that would be one thing to do is, is reduce the number of people you follow, and monitor emotionally how you feel when you're reading their posts. I think there are other things we can do. You can you can take, you can take a day off of social media, you know, spend one day a week without social media. There are lots of, controls that you can put into your phone or on your computer to limit when you can use them, or how much screen time you have. If if you're finding yourself spinning in an endless scroll, then then set those up and try them. I mean, it's it's not like you can't turn them off later. You can, I would encourage you to think about trying at seeing if it makes you feel better. And I really would encourage you go back to a play based, adulthood, go get involved in athletic leagues or, some sort of avocation, if it's dance or if it's bowling or, you know, if you're the kind of person who likes to play Dungeons and Dragons, do it in real life rather than virtually, whatever it is, start doing those things with other people again. Maybe.