Less is More?
The beginning of a new calendar year is often accompanied with a fresh set of enthusiastic goals as people stop to reflect on their future and the habits needed to move towards that vision. One behaviour to watch carefully is our social media usage. According to the Statistics Canada study “Canadians’ assessments of social media in their lives,” which surveyed social media users between the ages of 15 and 64, respondents noted that cutting down on social media usage would benefit their lives in a number of ways. 19% noticed their social media usage diminished their amount of sleep, 22% reported engaging in less physical activity, and 18% described social media usage contributing to trouble concentrating on tasks or activities. Approximately one in eight respondents, or 12% to 14%, reported feeling envious of others, anxious, or depressed. For organizations interested in the implications of social media usage at work, unsurprisingly, it also has implications for our productivity.
Mindfulness Buffers the Strain of Social Media Overuse
Recently, I published a paper in Behaviour & Information Technology with Drs. Erica Carleton, Megan Walsh, and Amanda Hancock that examined what personal resources individuals could draw upon to decrease the tendency for social media overuse to reduce employee work effort. We collaborated with MindWellU.com, a mental health services platform for individuals and organizations, to see how mindfulness practices might help to increase self-control, which we expected could help people make decisions about directing their attention and behaviour. We followed 227 participants partaking in MindWell’s 30-day mindfulness challenge during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (May/June 2020) where they watched short mindfulness videos, or practiced mindfulness techniques like breath awareness and paying attention to their five senses for brief periods of time. To examine our theoretical model, we used experience sampling methods (ESM) to send participants multiple surveys a day over an extended period of time, resulting in 3,851 data points. We found that daily social media overuse was related to decreased daily work effort through reduced state self-control; however, participants experienced less decline in work effort following social media overuse on days that they were more mindful, suggesting mindfulness acts as a personal resource that buffers the strain on daily state self-control capacity.
Paying Attention to Our Inner World
To put this research into practice, perhaps a helpful question to ask oneself is whether the activities one engages in are taxing or regenerating. In other words, how do you feel after spending time in this way, working on certain tasks, or being with certain people? If scrolling on Instagram feels uplifting, great. On the other hand, if your social media app of choice elicits feelings of insufficiency, and self-control resources are burned up by exerting will power to avoid consuming products, or regulating hard emotions, than that experience is important to notice.
Another observation individuals interested in reducing their social media usage may value comes from paying closer attention to what one feels, or their state of mind before the the habit of scrolling get triggered. What emotion is social media distracting users from feeling? Is it loneliness, agitation, or a general sense of ennui – a feeling of weariness related to an overall sense of languishing and disconnection? Being present with oneself (as opposed to being constantly entertained) is often considered inaccessible (“I can’t meditate”), uncomfortable or just plain boring. Yet, Dr. Richard Schwartz, one of the current leading voices in the modern world of psychotherapy, argues that being connected to our inner world is a valuable yet highly underdeveloped skill that can help us manage our thoughts, feelings, and behaviour.
Do We Really Need To Be More and Do Better?
Pema Chödrön is an American-born Tibetan Buddhist, ordained nun, former acharya of Shambhala Buddhism, and author of over a dozen books. In Start Where you Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living, she writes: “We already have everything we need. There is no need for self-improvement. All these trips that we lay on ourselves—the heavy-duty fearing that we’re bad and hoping that we’re good, the identities that we so dearly cling to, the rage, the jealousy and the addictions of all kinds—never touch our basic wealth. They are like clouds that temporarily block the sun. But all the time our warmth and brilliance are right here. This is who we really are.”
At the very least, expanding resolutions to include less social media usage and more mindfulness practice stands to support our work and health outcomes. Yet, in attuning to ourselves and detaching more from external influences, we may find that the incessant drive for self-improvement may replaced by a curiosity to meet the brilliance that already exists within, should we finally make the commitment to attune to our inner world.