Episode 20
Social Media, Cortisol, FOMO and Focus
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Transcript
Welcome back to the Fully Nourished podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Ash, Functional Nutritionist and Integrative Health Coach, coming to you with a scientific and spiritual exploration of what it looks like to awaken our feminine radiance by becoming deeply and fully nourished in a world that wants to dull us down. You ready?
As a reminder, everything in this podcast is for education and inspiration only and is not intended as medical advice. Please talk to the appropriate professional when necessary, and please use common sense before making any changes to your diet and lifestyle.
So a few weeks back, I polled you guys on social media, and I asked what stresses you out about social media. And also I asked you if social media makes you feel closer to health or farther away from health, we were kind of talking about information overload. And your responses really inspired me and I thought, you know what, I need to do a full episode on this because I think we're all gonna find it pretty interesting. And a great kind of conversation opener. Social media is a part of our lives whether we like it or not, we can begrudgingly accept it. But social media has become a part of all of our lives in different ways. And I feel like we all kind of utilize it differently. I'm hoping this can kind of start a conversation about how we can use social media without having it use us and what we need to be aware of physiologically so that we can harness social media as a tool versus have it really just rule over our lives.
So I labeled today's episode, “Social Media Cortisol FOMO and How to Focus” because I think that's really what's going on and the FOMO will come in in a second, you'll understand the FOMO in a second. So it's just kind of talking about the real physiological consequences of social media and what it's doing to us, but also like how we can harness it and use it right back. And for those of you that are interested, in the poll, I asked if social media was making women feel closer or further away from health, and a resounding majority of you said you feel farther away from health than you've ever been, even though there's more information than there has ever been. You've had more access to information at your fingertips than ever before. And you've you feel like you've learned a lot of information, but you don't actually know how to implement it, like you feel frozen, you feel overwhelmed, you feel kind of numb down.
Some of you, you know, some of you, God bless you, you said that you had no problems with social media, you're able to really create great boundaries, you only follow people that you want to learn from that don't overwhelm you with information. And that's amazing. That's an incredible practice. And then a few of you actually said that you are thankful for social media, because you would have never found health if it wasn't for social media. I found that really a great answer too because it shows us that there are many facets to something and something can be bad in some ways and also be great in other ways. It really does matter in that within the energy that we show up to platforms like Instagram with.
My Social Media Experience
I can tell you from my perspective, you know, the beginning of my health journey, which I think can sometimes be the most overwhelming and the scariest social media was not really like it was today. Instagram was kind of just starting out, I think, and primarily the social media that we used was YouTube, Facebook, kind of, I never really used Facebook. So I learned a majority of things that I needed to learn by wading through books. I went to the library like multiple days a week and rented whatever books I could find – textbooks. I would order them from other libraries and have them shipped over. I had to dig into the bowels of the internet and read a lot of blog posts. I watched a lot of YouTube videos and seminars and things. I’d sign up for people’s seminars because at the time it was more like seminars and webinars that were recorded in person seminars. I feel like if social media was where it was today, it would have been much easier to learn the information that I needed to learn.
But on the flip side, I can also see how not having to really seek that information out, and just having it slap you in the face, I had to really hit the books and wade through what information was relevant and what wasn't. Whereas I think now you're just being thrown everything. And you have to figure out and decide what is relevant and what's not relevant. And that is exhausting and overwhelming. That's almost like more grueling work. Because there's a difference between being, you know, pounded with information from every direction, and actually having to go seek out specific information and dig into it.
But I keep going back to the overarching amount of you that said that the worst part of social media that stresses you out the most, because a lot of you said, it does make you feel farther away from health. But social media itself makes you feel this deep sense of FOMO. Or you constantly fear like you're missing out on something. So you're always reaching for your phone, you're always going back to the scroll because you want to make sure that you don't miss out on something important, and I have compassion for this feeling. Just because I do remember feeling this way for years with social media. I have also felt it from a different perspective, the creator side, where social media and algorithms and the way that people learn is constantly changing and shifting. And the way that we teach, whether we like it or not, even if it's not what comes natural to us, has to shift and change, at least on the micro level on social media. And that fast pace really makes it quite challenging to share valid information that is going to help or is going to educate or is going to inspire, and put time and energy and effort into something in thought.
Then especially if you're an original creator, and you're not just somebody that's kind of copying what everyone else is doing, you tend to find that it's very difficult to keep up on. On this side, it's very difficult to keep up with all the trends and what people are talking about and staying relevant, which regardless of if that really matters to you or not, it matters to stay relevant on social media. But it sounds like what everybody is experiencing is almost like social media feels like a quick flowing river that if you don't get in enough times, or you are behind on jumping into the river, you're gonna feel behind. But once you jump into the river, it's just going to take you very quickly and suck you under and it's gonna be really, really hard to kind of drag yourself back out.
The Hormonal Aspect
I think for a lot of us, we experienced this feeling and then we disassociate from our body. And here, it feels only like 20 minutes has gone by, but three hours have gone by. I find this fascinating because what I've learned from my work is that hormones will definitely drive certain behaviors, or people will be prone to practice certain behaviors depending on their hormonal structure, or what hormones are higher, low or balanced or imbalanced. But what you see a lot happen as well as behavior will drive the hormones. So whether the hormones come first is kind of a chicken or egg situation, sometimes people's hormonal imbalances will drive them to practice certain behaviors, whereas some people's behaviors, they're doing them so much that they end up shifting hormones. And then you have, you're kind of caught up in this vicious cycle of hormones driving behavior and behavior driving hormones.
And so as someone who really nerds out on hormones, and really like seeks to understand what our bodies are trying to communicate on a deeper level, I am always contemplating what the hormonal impact of spending more and more time on social media is doing to our bodies. And what is it shifting in our bodies, not only on an individual level, but also a collective level, on how we interact with one another in relationships, and community. Because that's going to inevitably impact our quality of life, our happiness, our health, our gut function, all of those get modulated by the people around us and what we spend our time doing. And so as you've seen this kind of evolution, over the past 10 years I would say, of how social has shifted and changed, you know, the way that we have learned information has changed so much. Before, it took a while to accumulate information and to really master a topic and then when you shared about the topic you would share about it with a post or an image or a blog post or an email or something like that.
Whereas now, we're really sharing so many small little tidbits of rapid-firing information that our brains are getting accustomed to “mastering: a topic within 90 seconds. Actually, it's actually getting shorter and shorter. Now, we used to have the attention span of three minutes, you know. And now a 62nd video feels like an eternity, we want someone to get to the point within seconds, we don't want to hear about the nuance, we don't want to hear about the context, we just want the quick hitting information or entertainment that's going to give us the dopamine fix that we're after. Because really what's happening is, as we jump into this free flowing river, we will get inevitably sucked up by this kind of pattern of dopamine, these highs and lows of dopamine. Every time we scroll, every time we find something that excites us, or makes us entertained or laugh, we inevitably are going to get that hit of dopamine, and then it's going to eventually drop and then we're going to seek out the next dopamine rise, or “hit” if we want to call it that.
There's this book that was recommended to me by a friend. It's called “Dopamine Nation” by Dr. Anna Lembke. The overarching theme of the book is that we live in this age of indulgence, where we're kind of almost victims of our own desires for pleasure. We don't like discomfort, we don't like pain, we don't like anything that is uncomfortable at all. And our brains are really being trained to seek out constant pleasure. And it's almost like we can't survive the in between, you know, life is not supposed to be completely pleasurable and indulgent at every second of every day, or it actually becomes almost numb, because there's just no highs and lows. Everything's just kind of meh. But yeah, it's a really fascinating book, just about this kind of concept of how our brains are really being trained to just seek out constant pleasure. And things are becoming less and less enough. So, it inevitably leads to us seeking more and more and more and faster and faster and faster.
I also kind of sometimes think about hormones, in the concept of their personality, like their activity and their energetic imprint on the body. I think of estrogen oftentimes as a hormone of newness, or a hormone of potential in a way where estrogen is there. And it's a big part of the female physiology, because we need to have something that drives massive amounts of growth. And it's going to require us to crave a type of newness, because when we start to chart unnavigated waters, which is kind of what I visualized, when I think of estrogen, it grows and it shifts and it changes and it kind of starts to carve new paths in a sense, and that's often why it's referred to in more pro metabolic spaces as a stress hormone, or as a hormone of stress. Because when unchecked, this constant desire for newness, this constant push for growth and cellular proliferation when left unchecked, that can quickly become a “bad thing,” it can quickly become a dangerous thing, which is why our more dominant female hormone progesterone is that hormone of consciousness where it takes the potential and it makes it conscious so that it's focused.
And you see this reflected in the female cycle where the first half of the cycle is dominated by estrogen, right? We don't make progesterone until we ovulate. So leading up to ovulation, there really is this feeling of racing or this is almost moving towards something great, something grand, because you actually have on a very physical level, these egg follicles racing towards ovulation. And so you have estrogen and to kind of usher that in and usher in that growth and explosion. But estrogen starts to subtly rise after we stop bleeding, and will subtly rise up and peak right before we ovulate to bring on that ovulation, that powerful burst of life. But once ovulation occurs, then the empty egg sack that the egg was in actually starts to become a hormone producing gland called the corpus luteum. And the hormone that it mainly produces is progesterone. Then progesterone becomes that dominant hormone for the last half of the cycle and it actually takes what estrogen did, and it changes it.
So for example, within the uterus, the cells shift from these long kind of rectangular shaped cells to these spirals shaped cells, you know, it acts upon the uterine tissue and the ovarian tissue In the breast tissue and the brain tissue and the lung tissue, and it completely shifts our physiology to now focus the estrogen on something specific, which is new life or a possible and potential pregnancy. And so you do see the balance of the female cycle as a reflection of feminine energy communication to us about how feminine energy operates, where we have this kind of 50/50 balance between moving forward or growth, and then sitting with the growth and structuring it properly. Or I would see this reflected in energy consumption as we consume, consume, consume nutrients, proteins, carbs, fats, minerals, vitamins, and we grow a human being, we focus that inward for this growth, growth, growth, growth, growth, growth, growth, and then this explosion of growth happens. And so there's always this balance within the feminine of consumption and creation, consumption and creation, death and life, death and life, death and life, right? Every cycle is a representation of the life-death cycle, every menstrual cycle we really do teeter energetically in 50/50 in between, and too much of one will definitely make us feel out of balance, and too much of the other will definitely make us feel out of balance as well.
And so if we're constantly hopping on social media, seeking constant new information, and I think it really depends on how we're jumping on. A lot of us use social media, Instagram, Tik Tok, those types of platforms to really, I think, kind of disassociate, or to escape pain, or to sometimes even just check out to distract ourselves. I think I see it almost as like a binky. We're, you know, we feel something. And instead of meeting that need, or figuring out how that need needs to be met, we just go and like, suck on our binky. But what happens hormonally, I do wonder if the seeking of constant newness of that behavior is leading to more estrogen creation in both women, and I would guess maybe men too, you tend to see this a lot, too.
Seeking Newness
This is kind of a tangent. But if you're not quite understanding what I mean, by seeking constant newness, you'll tend to see this as women start to age, usually, they'll hit their mid 30s, and 40s. If they are not supporting their bodies, nourishing their bodies over time, you know, they'll become depleted in minerals, they will accumulate estrogen, iron, heavy metals, things like that, maybe their livers will get a little sluggish. Maybe they're not getting the proteins they need or the carbs they need or the fats they need or the exercise that they need. And they'll tend to become more and more estrogen dominant over time.
This is why you see symptoms tend to kick up around like the perimenopausal years, because your body just can't lie anymore. Like it doesn't have room for the bullshit. It's really trying to get what it needs. So it can go through its next transition in life. And really, it's crowning glory, which I feel like what menopause really is. That's the time when we're crowned. But in our society, I find it kind of funny that the middle aged crisis or the 30-39 year old crisis is very typically a thing. And I've just noticed this as an observation over the years, acquaintances that I have people that I know or that I used to know. And you'll be like, Oh, my gosh, what happened to Debbie, you know, and a lot of women around that time tend to blow their lives up too because they're craving something new. Like I have acquaintances that have had affairs with men, like half their age, or other women that like make really kind of like, just surprising decisions and blow up their family, or just act kind of almost, in a way just erratic in behavior and doing something completely out of character and doing something completely out of the norm that ends up leading them to be extremely unhappy down the line. Like I'm not talking about people that make the big life moves that are necessary for growth and reaching your potential. I'm talking about women that make really, really dumb mistakes, and then end up paying serious consequences for them a couple years later, like they're just being really impulsive and erratic.
I always wonder if that's in part because they're not ovulating as well or for some women not ovulating as regularly, and they're not making as much progesterone and so they are tending to step into that stage of life where typically women are going to be more estrogen dominant or have much more estrogen in relationship to progesterone, but I really think there's something to estrogen, too much estrogen driving this constant need for something new constant need for excitement and what's around the corner and really seeking that out.
On the Hunt
And I think another layer of social media on top of that is really how it puts us in hunting mode. So when we go on social media, we're on the hunt for something more entertaining than the last thing or more informational than the last thing. And so we're kind of constantly hunting for these small dopamine hits, followed by these lows. So we have the desire for newness, driving estrogen, and then this hunting, where we're getting these hits of dopamine, these highs and lows of dopamine. And then eventually, what happens to especially women – we’re much more sensitive to neurotransmitter shifts, we're much more capable of making things like oxytocin and dopamine than men are, because our bodies are driven more by safety and comfort – and so eventually, we become really sensitive to these neurotransmitter shifts. And the thing about neurotransmitters that's interesting is you'll always hear serotonin is kind of praised as the happy hormone.
But neurotransmitters really work in balance with one another similarly to hormones, and you want them all in balance, one is not really better than the other, you know, serotonin is not better than dopamine. And that's not better than GABA, you kind of want them all to be balanced and synchronized. And when we have low dopamine, we're often going to start to see higher serotonin and too high of serotonin is not a happy hormone, it's more of a numbing hormone. It puts us into a state of learned helplessness, that kind of feeling of just knowing all the answers or knowing how to get to somewhere, but I don't really care about doing any of those things, almost a numbness towards life. But you see, within the research, it's quite clear that elevated serotonin will absolutely drive a state of learned helplessness. And that can be a really scary place to be because it's a place where you know what to do about it, but you feel helpless to do anything about it.
Comparison and Competition
So we have the neurotransmitter layer with social media. Then we also have the extra added layer of comparison and competition. And I think this is really particularly something that women should pay attention to, because a state of competition is definitely more masculine in energy. I think a little bit of healthy competition, just like most women who have even feminine energy are very good at living within their feminine energy, they do have masculine energy to tap into whenever they need. And it can be really fun to be competitive once in a while and to step into your masculine energy and just put your head to the grindstone and just go. There are times and a place for it. But if we stay there too long, that's when we start to feel really imbalanced.
I think what happens a lot is when women start scrolling on social media, they're inevitably starting to compare their lives to others, they're starting to inevitably compare their homes to others, they're close to others, their face, their body, whatever it might be, unless you're actively vigilant about not comparing yourself to somebody else. I think it's only natural. Because we are such community oriented beings, we're meant to want to connect with other women, we're meant to want to connect with our community and to share our lives with the people that we care about. That's how we're designed, we de-stress and we connect with other women by bonding and relating to them. That's natural, and that's normal. But when we're not in the right headspace, or we're not aware of that, we can easily start to confuse good strong connections and bonding and looking at women and relating to them and saying like, that woman feeds me and I can do better in my own life, we start to move into the comparison of Oh, no, I think I might be doing something wrong. Or there's something wrong with me because I don't look like that or act like that. Or a relationship is not like that, or my home doesn't look like that, or whatever it might be. And that if we're not careful can easily spill over into competition where now we start competing.
It’s interesting because we're not actually competing with that person. We think we are. But we're actually competing with an image of that person, or assumptions about that person that our mind has created. So we're competing with someone completely imaginary that exists within our own mind, and it starts to steal away our contentment. And it also starts to stimulate adrenaline. Anytime we're in that strong state of competition and having to now compete, we're going to be in a constant place of adrenaline production. Eventually, we're going to start to see more testosterone production and more masculine energy showing up in other areas of our lives. We're going to be a little bit more stressed, a little bit more snappy, feel more disconnected. And so there is that extra layer of social media if we're not careful.
Now we're also adding stress to the mix on top of this constant desire for newness possibly driving estrogen, and these highs and lows of dopamine and this excessive serotonin and then on top of it the adrenaline that comes from competition. All the while, so many people admitted to me that the underlying feeling is a feeling of missing out, like a constant feeling of being rushed to go back to social, because you're afraid you're going to miss out on something really important or really vital. And so that adds another layer of stress to our nervous system. I mean, the fear of missing out on something, especially if we've convinced our nervous system or our body that it is a life or death thing, that it's going to be a thing necessary for life or death, our body really is gonna believe that this is a life or death situation. So I wanted to break down that kind of hormonal cascade for you. Because I think it's important for us to recognize that it's not hopeless, but we need to be aware of these things and we need to be aware of how our behaviors can drive hormonal changes, and we aren't helpless to it.
And it's also not a situation where it's like black or white, where I either need to be on social media, or be completely off social media. I've been noticing influencers do this a lot. They're like, I'm going to take a break from social media. And then they come back like a week later, and you start to see them posting more and more, then like, I'm going to take a break from social media, like, I'll be off for two weeks, see you later in two weeks. And it's like, okay, bye, no one asked. But the people that tend to do this a lot like they tend to do it all of the time, to the point where I'm like, Just do it, like prove it to me that you can do it, because I don't believe you anymore. But to me, it's like a representation of that extremist mindset that tends to operate within the health and wellness space.
But even beyond where it's all or nothing, either eating pizza or takeout every night and never exercising, or I'm doing like 75 Day Hard. And I'm working out twice a day, and only eating meal prep meals. And I think that's sometimes the behavior we have with social media where it's like, I'm either on it, or I'm off it. But like with most things, and you probably used to be doing it by now it's just I hate just falling into the trap of that type of thinking. It's it's such a sign of a lack of neuroplasticity, that we only see the black and white of a situation and we can't see the fifty shades of grey in between the nuance and the context. That just shows us that our brain has gotten to a point where it's so tired of reasoning and thinking through and trying to see the variety of options that are just jumping to the extreme sides of the coin.
And so, you know, we find ourselves in a situation on social too, and I see this a lot with people is that we've gotten to a place where learning about something or learning the basics of something gives us a sense of accomplishment, we feel like we've accomplished something when we've watched a full 92nd video, you know, and I think a lot of us are also addicted to feeling the illusion of success. You know, all we've really done is sat there and watched a 92nd video about something, learned very little about it, have not truly learned it, have not truly mastered it and not truly implemented it, right? None of those things are probably even possible from the small amount of information we just learned on it. Yet we feel like that has equipped us for everything that we need to know, we're really falling into the trap of having other people think for us. And then so that we don't have to deal with the thinking, which I will admit is super, super helpful with certain things, and I am forever grateful for it. You know, there are certain things that I'm just not interested in studying or learning or researching. And so I'm so happy when people do that work for me.
And so again, as long as we're aware of that, and we're not building a false sense of accomplishment on, you know, we feel like because we've watched three 92 second videos about it, we're some type of expert on something. And we still need to be open minded and continue to learn, I think that can be a really, really helpful aspect of social media. However, if we're feeling low about ourselves, or we're feeling a certain way, that sense of accomplishment can sometimes get dangerous, because again, we'll reach for our binky, and make us start to feel a lot better about whatever it is we're feeling. But now we'll just jump on, start sucking on our binky and chase that false sense of accomplishment.
So I think the learning aspect of social media can be quite the double edged sword. We can utilize it to our advantage and use it to save time and energy and headspace for when we really don't want to do the work. But then at the same time, we also need to be aware that not everything can be learned in watching a couple 92nd videos or reading a couple of long Instagram captions. And there are things that we do need to learn to master and linger on and really research and sit with the information and ruminate over it instead of jumping to the next thing constantly. Because information that has really no wisdom or context can be so, so dangerous and accumulation of information is not always a guarantee that we're going to be okay or it's something is going to be right for us, or our bodies, or our situation.
But I do notice that people tend to just seek out more and more information on things especially when they're facing some type of health problem, or they're trying to figure something out, instead of kind of balancing the consumption with creation, even in their research process, you know, having that trust and surrender, they take everything right onto their shoulders, and they just say, like, I have to figure this out, I have to figure out how to fix this. And they just start digging and digging and seeking and searching and seeking and searching. What ends up happening is they leave no room for the ideas to develop, or the information to mature, or ruminate or expand or grow in their head or click, usually that happens in a time of boredom, when we're kind of ruminating over what we've learned. And we're kind of bored. We're thinking about things.
I really believe in the power of boredom, there's so many things I have discovered, when I am bored. It's truly when the creative process takes place in the most powerful ways, is when all of those things that you have learned or accumulated or observed over time is kind of coming together and has space to move around and kind of restructure itself. And in our society, right now we're finding less and less opportunities to be bored, right? It's so easy to never be bored. And I don't think we should get boredom confused with being unfulfilled or unstimulated. There's a big difference. But we're so used to now being stimulated all of the time, that we are uncomfortable being bored or just doing nothing. But what I have learned over the years is that feminine learning when you're truly trying to grasp a concept, and then I think, you know, women were born teachers, our our job is really to learn information, take in information, taken our experiences, alchemize it and then become teachers guiders. That's our job, we are going to guide, we're going to teach eventually, right. And so for us and our experience, and how we learn, it really requires a lot more lingering with something.
I have had to learn this the hard way over the years. But I used to try to learn in such a masculine way. And it never really worked. Like I tried to keep so much structure to my learning and structure to my researching. And it would actually stick me in a box where things didn't really click for me in the ways that they do now, because I'm now used to creating a lot of space, and how I research and space and how I learn. And if I'm feeling stuck, you know, I rarely learn a lot from social media. But if I'm feeling stuck, sometimes social media will kind of operate more as like a Tarot card or something like that, where I'm kind of lost and I don't know which direction to head. And I am not really feeling my intuition guide me, you know, nothing is jumped out at me, sometimes I'll hop on social media and like the first thing to pop up is the answer I have been searching for. So I'm very open to how information is going to be shared with me. But I have learned now after more than a decade in my own health journey that very rarely am I going to find the answer when I'm out there seeking it out seeking it out like a madwoman, you know.
Desperation, the state of desperation or fear, I find that the most answers come to me when I put the intention out there. And I know that I need an answer. I say like I'm looking for the answer now. And usually it just slaps me in the face in the weirdest ways. Like I don't even have to really look for it, it just comes in and hits me in the face. And to me, that is the 50/50 creative process of me and the universe, that, as long as I trust and I surrender and I let go, that whatever I need will find me because I magnetize it to me. When I see women that are just constantly doing this kind of toxic behavior, where it's like, I have to read 10 to 15 pages of this book a day or a week or a month, or whatever it is. And you know, I'm going to take this class and this class and this class and this class, and they never stop learning, or they never stop learning to just linger for a second in what they just learned. At least from my experience, I really feel like it locks us in a box in how we can expand.
Choosing How to Interact with Social Media
I know this was kind of a weird conversation. It's just kind of a brain dump in regards to social media, and what are the answers because I don't really like to leave here without action steps. I wish I knew the answers. But I think the overwhelming lesson that we're all learning is all of social media is what we do with it. You know, the power is really in our hands to determine how something is used. I think it is an excuse when we say like, well, I just can't get off or I just can't do this. We need to own our choices. As women we need to take accountability for our choices and say, I'm choosing this, I'm sure choosing to do this, I'm choosing to do this. I see a lot of times, we often play the blame game, where it's like, well, this is just happening to me or it's my hormones or my emotions, or my this or my that. But at the end of the day, our choices are our own, which means our power is our own. And we can use social media as a tool. And we do need to recognize that it does shape us more than we think we do have control over ourselves, and how we use it. But we need to start practicing more awareness, a lot of us are using it as a pacifier.
So really, you know, how are we showing up to social media? If we're showing up in an emotionally distressed state, it's probably a better idea to meet our needs in other ways, because social is not going to meet our needs, it's just going to be a little dinky little pacifier for us to suck on and disassociate, or to kind of numb ourselves down and feel a little better about ourselves. But we have to recognize that that behavior in the first place is really impacting how we're feeling right now. It impacts how we're interacting with our life. And it's giving us less patience, and less pleasure and joy in the things that we should find pleasure and joy in. It’s acting as kind of a vicious cycle. Because whenever we're not experiencing the pleasure, the joy, we reach for the phone.
And so for me, I know what works for me is I don't really go on social media when I'm feeling emotionally distraught, or emotionally down or sad, I try to not make a habit of that, because it almost inevitably makes me feel worse. And I'm also aware of the type of information I'm going to consume when I'm in that state. Because I know that if I'm in a state of adrenaline, or cortisol or fear, I'm going to attach much more to the negative information in a blog or an article or post than the positive information. I'm going to be scanning for the threats instead of scanning for the goods and the positives. Because that's what we're wired to do when we're under stress, right? We're looking for the threats.
So for me, it's like before I even reach for my phone, I'm always asking, like, what am I after right now, because if I'm after something, the phone is not going to give me that. If I'm craving something, or I'm hungry for something, my phone is not going to give me that. I also think we want to really keep ourselves sharp. And we don't want to fall into this kind of short attention span where we can't focus on anything, we can't master anything. We're always bored, we're always looking for the next thing. I really think we need to be more aware of what type of content we're consuming, and kind of balancing it out, like balancing out our short form content consumption, with longer form content consumption. You know, almost like forcing ourselves to read books or listen to audiobooks, or learn about a topic and a much longer duration in a way because it trains us for patience in a way that short form content does not. And the way that that requires us to ruminate and marinate on things.
When you learn things much more slowly, or in an expanded way, like a book, or an audio book, or even a long YouTube video or a long blog post, we have to really sit and decipher through the information. It exercises the brain in a completely different way. And it teaches us how to pick out the information that is important. I think that's a very important brain skill to have. Because when we are consuming short form content, we're going to be thrown tons and tons of information constantly all of these summarized high points, these things we need to be watching for and concerned with or thinking about. And we need to be able to quickly be able to decipher what is relevant to us and our situation and our experience and what is not. And so what better way to do that, than to do it on a much slower basis. I almost look at it as like foundational training to be able to weed and wade through all of the BS.
Another practice that I do with social media, and just my phone in general is I have if you're watching on YouTube, I'm showing it but I have this little phone stand. And I just got it on Amazon and it lives on my desk. And I always keep my phone on this little phone stand. Very rarely is it going to be somewhere else besides the phone stand, which usually leads to me, when I'm wanting to reach for my phone, I have to get up from where I'm at and walk over to actually go and fetch and receive my phone. And this added barrier really acts as a very healthy way for me to check myself like do I really need my phone? Or am I just impulsively reaching for it because I'm bored or because I don't want to feel what I'm feeling or whatever I'm trying to distract myself or disassociate. And so I like to keep my phone in particular spots whether it's in my house at my desk or it's in my purse in a specific pocket that it stays in. Or you know if I was going to work I would probably have have another phone stand there so that I have a place where like, it almost becomes muscle memory for me to set my phone there. And so I have to go and physically retrieve it, which always creates this boundary or barrier that allows me to check myself why I'm reaching for my phone.
And a lot of times, I know for myself, I reach for my phone when I'm bored and I want to go start seeking something out, searching something, instead of really thinking and ruminating on the topic. I'm trying to figure something out very quickly. And so it's a continuous practice for me to sit with the discomfort of being bored and allow myself to be bored, and doing things that require me to slow down and be bored. Like, not feel like I have to constantly be doing something.
Mindfully Jumping in the River
In fact, usually when I'm not doing something is when I'm doing the most productive thing. I always try to show up when I do decide to go into social or, or like Instagram, for example, I'm diving into the river, I know it's a swift moving river, that's going to suck me in. And so I practice caution with it like I would a swift moving river. I really like to put in the practice of intentionally going and seeking out the people that I want to check out rather than scrolling and mindlessly scrolling, because mindless scrolling is what is going to lead to the dopamine hits and the kind of mindless seeking. Whereas it's like I'm intentionally going to this person's page to check out what they did recently, or check in. And to recognize that if I missed out on information, this is a really important point that I was supposed to miss out on it. And if I have caught this information, I was supposed to catch that information. What I have seen and what I have learned was exactly what I was supposed to see and learn for the day. And I did not miss out on anything that I did not need to see.
That's really where that surrender and trust and letting go comes in and kind of trusting that you will be provided for and everything around you is going to work out in your best interest in time. All you have to do is trust and surrender to the process and really accept the discomfort in not knowing or not having control, not seeing the big picture, but trusting that the big picture is in motion. I think to like really recognize the power of fasting from social media and not like the types of fast we talked about earlier where it's like, I'm going to take a fast from social media, and then you're like you see them, you know, 13 hours later on their on their binder, because they weren't really serious about it. But really just intentionally kind of getting off and just not going back in and getting used to that feeling of FOMO and showing yourself evidence that yes, I am missing out on something, the hustle and bustle of something, but I am at peace. I am content. I was complete without social media before it was even invented. And I am complete. Apart from now, you know, I am complete with or without it.
But the only way to show yourself evidence that you're going to survive without being there daily, is showing yourself that you can survive without being there daily and making an intention to not show up there daily. And show yourself the evidence that you won't miss anything, it's still there waiting for you when you get back, there's always the next sale, there's always the next launch, there's always the next article, you'll always be able to catch up if you need to, you didn't miss out on anything. It was just your perception that you need this outside information to feel whole and complete, that made you feel that way.
And then the last thing that I think is really practical is that we need community, we need hobbies, we need fun, we need play, we need things that we look forward to outside of social media. You know, social media is its own kind of community. I think we can all agree to that. But it isn't going to feed us the same way that human connection will. And it often serves as a really poor replacement for a lack of community and a feeling of loneliness and a feeling that we don't have a lot of human connection. And that's okay. But we don't want to spend all of our energy there so that we miss out on real life relationships and real life community because those are really important and feed us in completely different ways.
But I'm really hopeful that we're all going to find balance with social media and that social media is going to start to shift in a different direction because of our intentions and the way that we're showing up. We do have the power to change how creators create content with how we consume content, and that would change the world. But it's so crazy because you don't have to do much to change the world. You just have to start practicing awareness and intention and how you're showing up in your own life. And if we do that as a group, and we do it together, we're kind of this really powerful group that will have a bigger impact on what's going on. And that's how things really do change. So don't give up hope and don't become bitter and don't become cynical about it.
And also, don't be so extreme. If you know give yourself what you need, figure out what your needs are regarding social media boundaries, and then give yourself what you need. You don't have to go to the extremes. You don't have to be the two gym sessions a day, and only clean eating type of gal. Because as we've learned in the nourished community, the fully nourished community, it's like, if we do that we're eventually going to binge. That's just how we work. And we can apply the Fully Nourished principles that we've learned around food to more than just food and show up in a very similar way. Figure out our needs, meet our needs, and then nourish ourselves accordingly.
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