Sep 3

 Fatigue still kicking my ass. Pattern is the same. Long sleep. Takes hours to begin to feel human. A few short hours at the end of a day where I feel somewhat better.

Everything else is a struggle. And the word fatigue is a catchall. Yes. Fatigue. But also a swarm of other symptoms. From headaches and weird pressure headaches, to dizziness, tingles, screaming levels of pain around the torso, chest pains, blah yada sigh.

I struggled to fix the toilet seat yesterday. Simple job. Undo two butterfly bolts. Reattach screws. Tighten butterfly bolts. I did it. But boy. I nearly couldn't.

Ho hum.

Fading out. Life lived in twilight that is getting darker.

Eh meh. Rationally. This was always a high possibility. A decline.

Perhaps it's just a phase. Ha ha. That takes months. Years. To resolve. Yeah. Probably not.

Still trying to find the silver bullet that cures me. Not going to happen.

Had a brief thought the other day.

About the negativity that you can get from social media. It's not news that social media has been found to have a very negative effect on teenager mental health. That's a fact.

I'd make a supposition further than that and say it's corrosive to mental health regardless of your age. In fact. It poses a mental health risk to anyone using it. 

When I think about it, I know a bunch of people who have seemed to spiral downwards whilst on social media. Twitter in particular. Correlation or causation. Good point. But. I strongly suspect there's causation in there. I can think of a bunch of celebrities who have seemingly gone off the deep end in Twitter spirals. It makes me wonder if some of the nutcasery, bad behaviour et al is a symptom of the corrosive influence of these platforms.

But take it back to no conjectures, just facts.

CBT is currently the standard for treating stuff like depression and anxiety, but also a whole bunch of other things. It is by and large, just a way to think about things differently. To guard against negative spirals. The example I always like from CBT is the whole, imagine someone you know walks past you on the street and fails to acknowledge you. The negative outlook spiral would be that they hate you. What have you done to offend them. They don't want to know you anymore. You must be a terrible person and so on. CBT says, wait, negative spiral. There are other possible answers. They were lost in their own thoughts. They were having a really bad day and didn't notice you. Switched off. Etc. Many answers that have nothing to do with you. But the negative spiral thought pattern will concentrate on the negative, and ignore the neutral or positive.

CBT acknowledges that even everyday benign interactions and just living can be a challenge to mental health. Stopping the inner critic. And so it sets up a path of education and adjusting of behaviour and yada blah.

Ok.

So.

It's accepted that people can be damaged by otherwise benign things in life, not to mention negative things. A problem.

Now frame that from a social media perspective.

Where you absolutely know for sure it can involve a lot of negative interactions. Name calling. Arguments. Negative shit. That people can struggle to deal with privately.

Imagine what the mental health payload of that is.

This is 100 times worse than walking down the street and getting ignored.

So. Conjecture. It stands to reason then that social media can be absolutely horribly detrimental to a persons mental health. I'd even go so far to say that prolonged exposure to it is going to be the basis for forming disorders. Of which you then get a feedback loop. A spiral in other words. Increasingly erratic behaviour, worsening of mental state, worsening of dysfunction etc.

I wonder if this is not some of the case for people like Elon Musk. Who whilst no doubt was always something of an arsehole, seems to have really spiralled down into a full blow narcissist in recent years. Ditto with a lot of other similar types. I wonder if the corrosion of social media just pushes these people into worse states of mind.

I'm pretty sure it does it to everyone.

Not to say you can't have a positive experience on social media. And in a perfect world it can be helpful and a boon and yada. For sure. Social media can be a positive. But I think you have to be very careful about your environment to make it be so. And that so often it can be the opposite. With some platforms being far worse than others. I think Twitter is the poster child for toxic swamps. It can be the equivalent of a screaming lunatic in your ear 24 hours a day. And sure. No matter who you are. You're going to start to twitch if someone is constantly screaming at you.

Uh huh.

Bottom line.

I think social media is the biggest negative spiral influence there is. Corrosive to mental health. Behaviour adjusting. Addictive. Malformed pattern inducing. Disorder generating.

It's not a healthy place for people to hang out in without adequate management and foreknowledge.

Having a shot of whiskey from time to time can be enjoyable for some. Handing someone the bottle. Not so much. Handle with care.

I don't think we treat social media with enough caution. I'm not exaggerating when I think it should maybe carry a health warning on it. Like cigarettes. Using this platform may damage your health !x

And as for teens.

Yeah.

That shit needs to be regulated. Just like cigarettes. Or alcohol. There's a reason kids are protected.