The Abridged version:
- A 2018 study found that more than 30 minutes of daily social media usage increased feelings of loneliness and depression.
- Research has found that smartphone app notifications can contribute to a lack of focus.
- Several science-backed strategies can help mitigate the effects of social media and smartphones.
Andru Defeye served as Sacramento’s poet laureate from 2020-2024 and is the driving force behind Sacramento Poetry Week. In this regular feature, “The Great Joy Hunt,” he explores the science behind joy and shares strategies for adding more to our lives.
Many of us have resolved to increase our connection to those we love and community, take better care of ourselves and become more productive in achieving our goals for the new year. On the surface, these things appear to bring more joy into our lives, but some of the ways that we are working to do them may actually be draining our joy. I call this The Great Joy Heist.
The example I always use to explain The Great Joy Heist comes from a 2018 study by Barasch, Diehl, and Zauberman titled “How the Intention to Share Can Undermine Enjoyment.”
Picture yourself on vacation. You see the perfect sunset and pull out your phone to snap a picture.
If your intention was to remember this moment and make that sunset photo your screensaver or to send to your closest family and friends in a text message that says “wish you were here,” then it can heighten your mood and neurochemicals due to bonding, presence, meaning and satisfaction.
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On the other hand, if your intention is to share this photo on social media to a wide audience, it triggers what is known as a performance nervous system and third–person memory encoding, or looking at our lives and experiences as an observer. In the case of social media, we start thinking about how our picture will be perceived by others rather than simply enjoying the moment we have captured. This leads to increased anxiety and lower enjoyment.
Corrine Sako has been a licensed mental health professional for the past 20 years and has seen a significant increase in how anxious, depressed and burned out people are, despite all of the developments in technology and embrace of self-care culture. “The demands for our time, our energy, and our attention have increased,” she explains, “We are less connected in general; less connected to our neighbors, less connected to our families, less connected to our bodies, and less connected to ourselves.”
Digital depletion
We’ve already touched on the compare and despair nature of social media, but the digital nature of many of our days is quietly undermining our capacity for joy in ways most of us don’t even realize. A 2015 study specified that passive use of Facebook, aka “doomscrolling” or scrolling out of boredom, led to a decline in overall well-being while a 2018 study confirmed that more than a half hour of social media use daily contributes to increased loneliness and depression.
It’s not just social media. For instance a 2016 study found that having notifications on our phones causes inattention and lack of focus while a 2019 study found that having app notifications turned off entirely actually caused higher rates of anxiety in some participants because they felt like they might miss an important message.
So, what’s the answer? In that same 2019 study scientists found that having notifications batched together approximately three times a day was a sweet spot for lowering screen time while not increasing anxiety. A common practice to batch notifications is putting your phone on “Do Not Disturb” and only checking it a few times throughout the day. After only a few days research shows you will experience less phantom phone checking, fewer dopamine spikes and crashes, and more presence in what you’re doing.
Avoiding discomfort as self-protection
Over the centuries, human survival in nature depended on neurological systems to detect danger from predators and natural threats. While most of us don’t have to protect ourselves from apex predators on a daily basis anymore, these systems still exist within us. Often these systems can be hijacked by confusion between discomfort and danger in our brain chemicals. “We avoid things that make us uncomfortable and we tend to label that discomfort as evidence of a perceived threat,” Sako explains.
When discomfort arises, our primal brains activate. The amygdala is the brain’s early warning system and doesn’t know the difference between rejection, shame, conflict, uncertainty and physical danger so it processes them the same way. In addition, the insula, the part of the brain that monitors internal bodily states like hunger and sickness, flags physical and emotional pain the same. This registering of danger causes the pre-frontal cortex to go offline and this is where our perspective, meaning making, self soothing and long-term thinking happen.
“If we want to experience joy to its fullest extent then we need to be able to experience our other emotions to their fullest also,” Sako explains, and a study from 1996 addressing acceptance vs. suppression of emotion verifies this idea. The study found that participants who accepted rather than suppressed their emotions experienced reduced activation in stress systems which opened the systems back up for balanced emotional experience including positive emotions.
This is why we often feel such a relief when we decide to have hard conversations or address challenging situations in our lives versus feeling stressed out, anxious, and depressed when we don’t. “It is possible to experience discomfort without being overwhelmed by it,” Sako says, “That is what I help people do in my psychotherapy practice and they usually find that there is joy on the other side of it.”
Self-care purchases vs. practices
Science says that when it comes to self-care, practices beat out purchases every time. “Self-care is not a one-time event. It’s not a destination. It’s an ongoing practice,” Sako explains. A 2015 study backs her warning with evidence that practicing self-compassion is more than just a mood boost; it is a regulation system that rewires our brain’s meaning-making circuits while self-care purchases like spa days or vacations work mostly by temporarily spiking dopamine and do not have the same lasting effects on mental health and well-being.
Sako says just like our physical immune system, we must practice self compassion in order to “fortify our psychological immune system.” But what is self-compassion and how do we practice it?
Self-compassion is choosing to recognize your humanity in the face of your pain or mistakes and work to stabilize gently rather than attack or shame yourself. This can look like naming an emotion or the humanness of a moment when you make a mistake rather than beating yourself up. Speak to yourself the same way you would speak to a close friend in the same situation. Self-compassion is the practice of acceptance and not punishing yourself, and it takes time to become habit.
Remember, our brains don’t always tell us the truth, especially when they are looking to re-up on their dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins or other neurochemicals. Understanding how our joy is quietly stolen is how we learn to protect it. Keep hunting!
Andru Defeye is the former poet laureate of Sacramento and a regular contributor, writing The Great Joy Hunt for Abridged.