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Key points
- Today’s tech-saturated world heavily influences the nature of our emotional experiences.
- These experiences can be positive or negative depending on their content, duration, and our internal state.
- Being intentional about engaging with social media and digital technology is important for mental well-being.
This post is by Tara Srirangarajan.
It’s 10 p.m. and you pick up your phone with the intention of sending a text message before bed. Your eye is immediately drawn to the Instagram app; it looks like several notifications have stacked up, so you open the app to catch up on what you have missed. Before you know it, your thumb is tired from scrolling, it’s now midnight, and that text message still isn’t sent. Many of us have likely had the experience of getting sucked into mindlessly surfing the web. We may not realize how much time has gone by while we are “doomscrolling,” and the experience can seem strangely soothing in the moment but tends to leave us feeling anxious, distressed, or guilty.
Digital technology isn’t always problematic for our mental health. For example, watching uplifting YouTube videos can make us feel happy, relaxed, and sometimes even socially connected. Exchanging funny memes with friends who live on the other side of the world can brighten our day and strengthen social bonds, which are critical for psychological well-being. These experiences highlight the key point here, which is that technology can be used to make us feel better or worse (and sometimes, the difference isn’t so clear). Therefore, if we can be more intentional about how we engage with social media and technology more broadly, then this is a simple way to improve our well-being. So, one thing you might wonder is: what are the relevant factors that can tip the scale in one direction or the other and that we should keep in mind? Consider the following three factors which may make the most difference:
- Content, or the type of material we are engaging with: Reading news stories can help keep us informed about current affairs, but can also have the unintended consequence of making us feel hopeless or overwhelmed. Balancing the negative content with positive or neutral content can be helpful in mitigating negative feelings.
- Duration, or the amount of time we spend engaging: Watching too much negative content can cause stress, but similarly, scrolling through other people’s exciting “highlight reels” for hours can also leave us feeling inadequate, jealous, or in a cycle of social comparison. Consuming online content in small chunks of time (with breaks in between to attend to the real world) can help maintain much-needed psychological distance from the online world.
- Our own internal emotional state while engaging: Content and Duration have more to do with the external world, or the nature of the technology-related experience at hand. However, our internal world or emotional state can also play a critical role in how we process social media and how we end up feeling. Scientists refer to this type of emotion as “incidental affect,” which captures how we happen to be feeling at a certain time, beyond the impact of the scenario we are in. For instance, a LinkedIn post announcing a work rival’s promotion may leave us feeling either dismayed or unbothered, depending on internal factors including our current emotional/physiological state at the moment, like whether we’ve gotten enough sleep that day or had a meal yet. Choosing to engage with technology when we are already in a positive state of mind can form an emotional buffer that keeps us from being overly affected by online content.
Technology usage as a form of emotion regulation
The way we choose to engage with technology can be thought of as a type of emotion regulation, which refers to the range of processes used to manage or change our emotional states. These tech-related experiences differ in how directly they involve emotion regulation. For instance, accessing online content that is highly positive or negative would be considered an indirect way of altering one’s emotional state because the motivation underlying that behavior often doesn’t involve a concrete pre-existing goal to change one’s emotions. On the other hand, certain platforms like Calm (a meditation app) or Day One (a journaling app) are specifically designed with the aim of helping users achieve an emotion-related goal, like a state of mindfulness, acceptance, or gratitude. In this way, they can be thought of as relatively direct methods of emotion regulation via the use of technology.
There may also be a tradeoff in terms of the short-term versus long-term emotional effects of engaging with digital technology. For instance, scrolling through social media newsfeeds is entertaining in the moment, but can have negative downstream effects on our mental health if it leads to anxiety or low self-esteem. Balancing the immediate and delayed consequences of our media usage is critical for maintaining a healthy relationship with technology.
In light of these many considerations, how might we engage with digital technology as mindfully as possible? One option is to selectively limit our use and steer clear of certain platforms that consistently make us feel bad. In other words, we can be proactive about the input from the world that we allow to reach our emotional system. Another option is to use digital well-being tools like screen time monitoring, notification controls, and app usage limits, which can help us stick to our goals. Lastly, it can also be helpful to keep in mind that what we see online is rarely an accurate depiction of reality; indeed, a significant portion of what we see is likely a curated representation of what others would like us to see and believe. When we engage with technology in more intentional ways, we may come to realize that the way we structure our time with it (and the beliefs we form about what we see) can have a direct impact on how we end up feeling during and afterwards.
Putting these plans into practice is far from easy, but like any other habit, our patterns of consuming digital media can be refined over time. Choosing to engage with technology in a mindful and responsible manner is a key step toward cultivating a healthier emotional life.
Tara Srirangarajan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. She uses interdisciplinary experimental approaches including virtual reality, psychophysiology, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study how emotional states drive decision-making and consumer behavior.
