A short YouTube talk by Betsy Guerra examining how social media shifted from a neutral tool into an attention-grabbing 'tyrant' that can neurochemically alter behavior. The speaker explains the dopamine-driven addictive mechanics of notifications, shares a personal example of phone overuse, recommends practical boundaries (phone-free hours, morning routines), and offers contact info for support.
Chapters
Today we're going to talk about the relationship between mental health and social media. Social media was originally created to help with the spread of information, to support us in our growth professionally, in our ability to connect to one another despite the distance. Social media was created as a tool. And a tool by definition is a device that you can use to perform a certain function. A tool means that it's there, it's waiting. It's like a hammer. A hammer is. It's just there waiting for you to need it. A hammer has no power over you, no personality of its own, and it's only valuable in the measure that you attribute value to it, because you need to hammer something, but a hammer in and of itself cannot have power over you. Social media has gone from being a tool or being meant to be a tool to becoming a tyrant. It's our ruler. It's not just there still and waiting for us to need it or call on it. Social media has a tone, a voice, an alert. It screams, it vibrates, it has a personality on its own. It disrupts, it interrupts, it manipulates, it even measures our worth with likes and views and amounts of each of those. Social media has gone from being a tool to becoming a tyrant. And it even has the power to change our brains neurochemically. When we receive a ting and alert from social media, we release dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a feel good hormone that is very addictive because it's very connected to pleasure. And the pleasure we receive from a like a notification, a connection, a follower is releasing that dopamine in us. Which means that social media has become very addictive. But unlike drugs, which usually when we go to rehab and we try to overcome our addiction, we cannot just stop using a cold turkey. So like my friend and colleague says, Omar, he says that social media is like a food addiction. We can't stop eating all together. So we need to learn how to regulate the food that we eat and how we consciously eat in a way that serves us and nurtures us as opposed to in an addictive way. Well, the same is true with social media and technology because this applies to your phones, even if it's text messages and emails, it's the same, right? So how can we bring our tools back to tool status as opposed to our rulers and our. How can we help our children do that? And I think a good way of starting is by modeling it to them. I'm not a social media consumer, but I found myself addicted to my phone. There are times in which I'm spending beautiful quality time with my family. And I grab my phone to take a picture to capture that moment and record it forever. And then I get so sucked in by the notifications. And before you know it, I even forgot that I went to grab my phone for a picture because now I'm responding to all the text messages that the kids are waiting, posing for that picture. And I'm just looking at the text messages and the emails and the notifications and I got consumed by it. It called me. It, like it manipulated me. It disrupted my life and the moments that I was so present in. So I recently decided, that's it, that's it. I'm gonna walk the talk and I'm gonna practice what I preach. And I decided that the phone is gonna stay in the living room every day, an hour or so before I go to sleep. And I cannot touch it until after my morning routine, which includes my prayer, meditation and workout. So when, what happens is that when you wake up in the morning, the most productive time hour of your day is that first hour or the beginning hours. If we're using it to reply to emails and messages and look at the likes and whatnot, we're wasting the most precious time of our days to be creative. And then at night, before you go to sleep, what stays in your mind is processed through the night in your subconscious mind. And you're using that precious time of rest to process things that have to do with external circumstances, social media, what other people are going through, like your phone. How about you go to sleep visualizing what you want your next day or your life to be like so that that can be the thing that your subconscious mind processes when you're sleeping. So in trying to restore our mental health, in trying to minimize that addiction we have with technology, technology we get to experience and model for our children and the people who are watching. How to disconnect our value, our self worth and our identity from those tools that were meant to just support us, not own us. If you or someone you love is struggling with social media, technology, addiction, video games, anything, please feel free to contact us@betterwithbetsy.com and we'll be happy to have someone in our team support you or your loved one.
