Social Media in Today's Age: We are not well

Imagine for a second that a 6-year-old child is coming to see you to get some counseling. It doesn't really matter what your profession is as you are an adult most likely if you are reading this and are fully qualified to counsel a 6-year-old! The child sits down on a couch and you say, "What can I help you with?" The 6 year old says, "I just can't seem to breathe well anymore. It's not asthma, I just seem to be always a little short of breath and nervous all the time." A good course of action from here is to ask "Talk to me about your day. Maybe we can figure what is causing you problems." The 6-year-old says, "Well, I wake up and the first thing that happens is my older brother tells me that more people are sick and there are fires everywhere. Then I look outside, and I see all my friends playing with their new toys. Then I go to the bathroom and on the wall my mom always hangs up current news on the wall and today it was about how our president is a monster and no one has jobs anymore. Then I go to my playroom where I usually play for about four hours until lunch, but about every 10 minutes, one of my brothers comes into the room and yells about how someone was killed by bad guys or a kid my age was kidnapped. They usually yell about bad stuff. Sometimes a friend will actually come over really quick to show me their new toy or pictures of their vacation they took with their family. We can't take vacations right now or buy lots of stuff, so it makes me feel bad. Then I have lunch and during it, I like to hang a piece of artwork on the fridge. We play a game where all of my eight brothers and sister all hang artwork on the fridge and we get heart stickers on them if people like them. Yesterday, no one gave my paw patrol picture a single heart. Everyone else got one. It made me so sad. Today I drew one with more stuff blowing up like my brother, so I bet I will get one! I hope. I need something to make me feel good. I am going to stop there, but I think it becomes very clear what the problem is. This poor child is being constantly bombarded with bad news, constantly looking at what other people have. The child is starving for someone to acknowledge and like his picture, even if it isn't what he really wants to hang up and is living in a state of perpetual fear. I imagine you are seeing where I am going with this. I hope you do. And this was only your, I mean the child's day, until lunch! Imagine if the day continued like that until the child went to bed? This is how we are living. From the second we wake up to the second we go to bed, we are consuming toxicity. It is making us sick. I do not just mean spiritually or figuratively; I mean literally sick. We aren't meant to live this way. The fight or flight reaction we have built into us is one that is meant to help us pay attention to danger and protect us, but it is not something we are supposed to experience multiple times a day. The news is purposely scary because it wants to evoke a negative response from you, so you basically pay attention. This is why you see around seven negative stories to one positive story in the news today. Negative news activates the sympathetic nervous system, which causes your body to release stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which can directly lead to fatigue, depression, anxiety, and significant trouble sleeping. You may be saying you already know that and perhaps your way to escape for a second is to go onto social media to feel a little better. Maybe you are on social media because your hope is to post a picture that other people will like so you can feel some value (and a little dopamine hit). Now you are in the comparison and self-worth popularity trap, which is just, if not more dangerous than the news. Hopefully you have watched "Social Dilemma" on Netflix and already know that our teenage girls are killing themselves at twice the rate as they were 10 years ago. We don't ever take breaks from these cycles, even in the bathroom anymore. We certainly don't escape it at work because we are constantly picking up our phones. Every 10 minutes. Just like the little kid trying to play before lunch. If we could so easily diagnose why this child cannot breathe and is anxious, why can't we seem to do it with ourselves? I am going to repeat myself, but this is what I hope you take from this article that we are living lives that are literally making us sick. You can live a better life. Please take a second and think what you would tell that 6 year old to help him or her. It would probably entail saying to the child to stop looking at all the news around you that you cannot control, stop looking at what other people have and comparing yourself, stop craving other people's attention and finding your happiness in other people. Put the phone down and start living. Breathe again. Turns out this world may be better than what you have been seeing lately. Thank you for reading!