The influence of today’s technology on our mind, part 4.

Hartland Fall Convocation 2018: Tech Transformation

<p>The influence of today’s technology on our mind, part 4.</p>

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Hartland Institute of Health and Education

Christian Berdahl

Tech Transformation Part 4

Our numbers have thinned, but I'm glad that you're here.

And we're gonna continue as we dive into our presentation this morning.

Tech Transformation Part 4, social media's impact.

But what I want to do is start to get into some practical things in the sense of what's actually going on.

What I mean by practical is how can we evaluate where we are with our tech, perhaps even tech addiction.

So we're going to go through some specifics now.

We're going to look at social media's impact on us and specifically on our mental health.

And of course social media platforms obviously can have their benefits and indeed they do, but we've learned that using them too frequently can cause issues.

In fact, what they're finding is that it can cause us to be quite unhappy and isolated in the long run.

So there are 6 ways that social media could be negatively affecting your mental health without you actually even realizing it.

So we're going to go through 6 different things here that the researchers have discovered.

And you know, unfortunately, if you have spent any time on this planet, most of us struggle with our share of insecurities.

And they can range from just kind of minimal, and they can be extreme, unfortunately.

And unfortunately, what happens with social media is that we tend to compare ourselves and we compare ourselves to those people on social media that are putting out their absolute best foot forward and we think that this is just how they are normally.

And unfortunately many people are out there stalking other people and voyeuristically looking at these other people and their images.

They're staying up to date with their relationship statuses on Facebook and unfortunately it increases these feelings of self-doubt.

A study conducted by the University of Copenhagen found that many people suffer from Facebook envy.

That's actually a thing now, Facebook envy.

With those who abstain from using the popular site report that they felt more satisfied with their lives.

When you're, think about this, in your neighborhood, if you lived in a town, you have this idea of keeping up with the Joneses, right?

And we Christians, I hope it's not infecting us as well, but unfortunately it does, to where you would look at maybe your friend group or your neighbors, and you kind of just say, well, I mean, they have a nice home, I have a nice home, they have a nice car, I have a nice car, whatever it may be, oh, their kids are in private school, mine are, whatever the criteria it is that we are keeping up with the Joneses, the challenge now is, it's not with just a limited friend circle, or a family, or a neighborhood, we're now trying to keep up with, especially our young people, and even more specifically our young daughters, are trying to keep up with the world now.

Hundreds, even thousands of people that they're looking at all the time on social media.

Social media can cause us to become very dissatisfied with our lives because frankly we don't get to go to that school.

Before you know it, you can become extremely dissatisfied with actually a healthy, happy life otherwise.

Tim Bono, author of When Likes Aren't Enough, it's a really good book by the way, when we derive a sense of worth based on how we are doing relative to others, we place our happiness in a variable that is completely beyond our control.

And specifically for the Christian, the standard is Jesus Christ.

It's not supposed to be others around us.

And when you look at other people, especially on social media, it's a variable that's beyond our control.

Social media makes it extremely easy to compare our lives to others and that they have found is not good for our mental health.

And unfortunately we human beings, many of us, I'm a type A personality and I have a very competitive nature and what this does is it really helps us to become quite competitive And we tend to judge ourselves by comparing our lives with that of others.

I think about the young ladies in our church and in our communities.

And I think, you know, the keeping up with the Joneses, well, really today it's more like keeping up with the Kardashians.

And some of your young people know who they are.

And they're a well-to-do family, a Hollywood family, and they've become, frankly, media moguls and business entrepreneurs, and they're making hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.

I don't even know what their combined net worth is, but it's probably getting close to a billion dollars now.

And what happens is that our daughters are looking to these young ladies, although they're not so young anymore, but these ladies that have entire teams to help put them together.

And they take these selfies, and if you look at them, they're amazing, they're beautiful, of course they're beautiful people, but What they fail to realize is that it took them 5 hours to get to the place to where they can take that amazing photograph.

And yet our daughters that might have $10 worth of makeup are trying to compete with that.

And the reality is without a team of professionals, they don't look like that either.

You just think that it's just so candid and so, no, no, no, they are spending countless amount of money on these professionals and on procedures.

I mean, they're doing things all the time to tighten this and deaden this and let's put botulism in the forehead so it doesn't even crinkle when you have an expression.

Everyone's walking around with this perfect wrinkle-free skin with no expression.

And I got these lips that are sticking out like this.

How many people are, they're becoming so disingenuous and this is now becoming what we're calling beauty.

The latest research by the Disability Charity Scope found 60% of users on social media.

This was actually, they did a study with about 1, 500 Twitter and Facebook users, and here's what they found.

60% of users felt jealous of their peers on social media.

So just being on there, they're jealous of what other people's lives are and 62% felt isolated.

On social media, you see the disconnect here?

On social media, they're feeling isolated.

Be it Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, using social media excessively can increase our actual loneliness and it's just, People don't even perceive it because we're doing something that's supposed to be social in nature, but it tends to bring us more loneliness and it can lead to depression.

Interestingly enough, people with low self-esteem tend to be more active on social media.

So they already start off with low self-esteem and they tend to be the ones that are even more on social media.

They use social media mostly now for self-promotion, but sometimes they don't get the likes or that positive feedback that they're looking for, and they get upset if it doesn't go viral.

I've never had anything go viral, as though that's now the standard, the gold standard is you need to get something to go viral.

For something that may not even be of any sort of real impact in one's life.

And So unfortunately, because they're not getting the response that they want, because they're finding their self-worth in their self-image, they're building it on whether or not people like them online.

The challenge with this is that they can go deeper into the reclusive behaviors and retreat back into their loneliness, and they just become more and more dissatisfied.

The National Health Service in the UK has identified an alarming trend, listen, among girls specifically related to social media use.

They attribute stress and social media with a 68% increase in hospital admissions for self-harming behaviors in girls.

That means if you lined up 10 young ladies, 10 teens, and even early 20s, if you line them up, almost 7 of them will be having and deciding that I need to engage in self-harming behaviors.

Because they can never measure up to what's going on out there.

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Tech Transformation Part 4

Transcript

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