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If you are a person who always feels drained and spend hours on social media consuming short form content and want to feel productive and energised, then you have come to the right place.
This post will first cover what is social media(just kidding). By the end of this post you will know the factor that have drained you, and the neuroscience behind sticking on to social media for hours and how to get out this vicious circle and be more mindful.
Social media stands as a double-edged sword, bearing the potential for both prosperity and peril. On one hand, it bestows a wealth of resources, a boundless repository of knowledge and opportunities for personal and professional advancement. Yet, conversely, when scrutinizing its darker aspect, we observe the peril of individuals falling prey to its captivating allure.
In their pursuit of contentment, many become trapped in the labyrinth of endless scrolling, surrendering hours to the consumption of transient, bite-sized short form content, ultimately getting addicted to it.
The reason behind this addiction is? In order to answer this question we have take a step into the human brain functioning, mainly the dopamine system and its connection with the neural networks in brain.
Without getting too technical, basically dopamine is a neurotransmitter or a simply a chemical in brain that comes under the classification of a happy hormone or a feel good hormone such as endorphins and oxytocin.
Dopamine plays a major role in the motivational component of life. The social media’s short form content is designed in a such a way that, each time we consume short form content, there is a dopamine kick in our brain, so we keep scrolling, scrolling and get stuck in watching short form content.
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But eventually we get drained out at a certain period of time and feel unproductive, the reason behind this is “too much of information processing”. It is like pressing the accelerator and break of a car simultaneously for a long period of time.
So basically, when we learn something, firstly we see a information through books or internet or maybe listen to the information, we try to create new mental models(it happens through firing of neurons(basic building block of brain) or to be more precise it is neuro-plasticity).
Neuro-plasticity is the ability of the brain to form new connections, pathways and change how neural circuits are wired.
But we mostly try to link the concepts, or data with the previous mental models we have built and stored in the parts of brain such as hippocampus, neocortex, amygdala, PFC, basal ganglia etc.
Don’t get intimidated with the words, they are all just parts of the brain that is involved in creating different types of memories.The PFC is prefrontal cortex which is a part of the neocortex, it is basically the front part of our brain, that is involved in higher cognitive tasks such as attention, impulse inhibition, prospective memory and creativity and mainly short term memory storage and processing.
So, when there is too much of short form content consumption, there is a massive amount of work load given to the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, and the eye strain caused by the display will cause headaches, creating difficulty in concentrating. The information which we have obtained will not get converted into knowledge when there is no structure in information absorbed and no revision of the content. All the mentioned factors sums up and makes us feel tired, exhausted and unproductive.
The ideal solution for this problem is definitely not completely shutting down social media time from our routine, because we learn many things from it, which shapes our personality, behaviour and the way we think. The best solution will be optimisation, at the end of the day it is our responsibility to schedule timing and stay inclined towards positive and useful content on the internet to feel contended and productive.
Image Credits: Icons8 Team
That’s a wrap, good job if you have reached upto this line. To summarise, this article covers some basic ideologies of social media addiction, functioning of brain in context of forming memories, and solution to social media addiction. I hope you have learnt something useful through this article, if yes do share your valuable feedback in the comment section.
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