0:00 All right, I feel like this is something that needs to be talked about, and it's how we can start to tell who's addicted to social media. I feel like you can sort of gauge how glued to their screen someone is depending on their behavior and just how they act. I'm starting to find amongst my colleagues and my friends that the ones that you just know are on it chronically and have a difficult time, for example, maintaining eye contact or engaging in conversation. And they just generally walk around with their head a little lower and [music] just have this general sense of lowered self-esteem. And this ties in very well with the research in that the people who are chronically on social media have higher rates of anxiety, depression, and insomnia. And I want to
0:46 touch on insomnia the most because sleep is quite possibly one of the most important things that we can improve in our lives. Poor sleep means hormone imbalance, it means emotional dysregulation. And without a doubt, the use of these phones, especially in our beds, is causing us to go to sleep later and causing us to ponder and think on issues a lot longer than we would have. And it's recommended that if we want a good night's sleep, we should not be using our screens at least an hour before we hit the hay. So, not only is the use of screens causing us to stay up, it's also what we're exposing ourselves to, right? You could look at your screen and be reading a book, and that's completely different to scrolling algorithms. They're made to keep us engaged and show us the most outrageous and triggering content. And I mean, it
1:34 makes so much sense as to why we can't fall asleep. We've been shown all this stuff that's really, really hard to put ourselves to sleep to. And I think what happens is this vicious cycle, and this chain happens when we don't get enough sleep, our emotional dysregulation happens, and through the day we need something to keep us a little happier. We need something to get our mind off how poorly we feel. And a lot of the times, what we do is we turn to our phones. Our phones have quickly become, you know, the fastest escape hatch we've ever created. You can tell when we're uncomfortable in social situations, we pull out our phones because >> [music] >> it's almost like this safe haven for us. It's become socially acceptable to have this device in our hands that we can focus all our attention to when we no
2:20 longer want to be present in the world around us. And I think when you combine this lack of sleep, you know, I'm sure you can attest this as well, when you have low sleep, you just don't feel like engaging with the world. And if anything, everything feels a little bit heightened cuz of that. And again, what do we do? We we fall into our phones. And it creates this cycle, I think, when when we're in bed, we've got nothing else to do. We've just got our thoughts, and those themselves can be very very confronting. And so, we pull out our phones and get even deeper in the algorithm, causing us to lose our It's just this vicious cycle. And I want to ground this in research. I mean, obviously, a lot of it is an anecdotal as well. I can tell when I'm having poor sleep, I don't feel that great, and all these things happen. But for example, in a study with 467 teens in Scotland, they found that
3:05 increased social media use led to higher anxiety, higher depression, and higher insomnia. And another study showed that kids who used their phone for more than 4 hours a day had a 2.83 times increase in the rate of poor sleep. And on top of that 1.59 times suboptimal eye contact, which I think is a sign of not only poor sleep, but lower self-esteem. You know, when we're not feeling ourselves, not as confident as we are, eye contact is a is a big signifier, it's a big sign of that. It's very difficult to maintain eye contact in a conversation when we're not feeling great about ourselves. And we know that. And so, this is why I think it's a big marker of someone who's chronically on social media is when they can't maintain that eye contact. So,
3:51 with all this, I think it's so important to notice these signs, whether it's in your friends, your kids, or the people around you. And I think be kind to people. It's not an easy thing to go through, and a lot of times people don't really see the out. They don't really see the solution, and so you get dragged deeper and deeper into this mix of insomnia, and then having to go back to your screens and further insomnia. It's just vicious. And so again, I think it's so important just to be kind, be empathetic. And I think it's the reason why I make these videos is try to encourage people to use their phones less, or spend less time on screens. It's imperative. Yeah, that's just a thought from me. Thank you so much for watching. Like and subscribe if you enjoyed. I'll catch you. Peace.
