I don’t consider myself a particularly stressed person. I like my job. I work nine to five every day and I try to enjoy myself in my spare time. I’m a social media producer, so I have to run accounts on social networks and create multimedia content for them. I spend all my time online, but I never find it inappropriate or stressful; This befits a journalist in digital media, which seems natural for someone who has spent much of his adolescence online.
That’s how I thought about myself until I spent a week measuring my stress levels and found out that I’m actually quite stressed. I led #LikeMinded last month, a month-long campaign at BBC Future about social media and its impact on your mental health. It also made me examine my relationship with my smartphone. Turning on my phone in the morning and being constantly connected has become as much a part of my life as getting dressed or eating. Does this habit have anything to do with my being so nervous?
To learn more about myself, I conducted a one-week experiment to reveal my stress levels and social media use to my team and readers. I also persuaded other social media producers to get involved in a broader conversation about our relationship with our phones, both at work and at home. What’s important is that it shows how I compare myself to others — and that’s probably the most shocking thing about it.
test
I used three different monitors to measure my mental health and social media use over the course of a week: PIP, Moment, and Checky. The PIP is a small device that measures pressure levels through the electrical activity of the skin on the fingertips. Moment is an App that keeps track of how much time you spend on your phone, and Checky keeps track of how many times you check your phone each day. Here are the PIP results for me and other producers, including Dhruti Shah of BBC News, Eleanor Dunn of BBC Entertainment News and Elie Gordon, the head of social media at BBC Earth.
To be sure, from a scientific point of view, the “experiment ” apparently not very precise. First, we had no control group and only a few participants. The whole test is mainly for self-assessment, so that we can have a new understanding of ourselves.
I’m the second most stressed person. I had a normal working week during the test, so I’m not sure why I was less stressed on Tuesday and Thursday than on Monday and Wednesday; Tuesday, maybe because I went to the bar for lunch with the team. I’m not at home on Saturday, I’m at home on Sunday, but I don’t have a job, and the stress level is the same as on a weekday.
I learned three main things:
- Weekends don’t get less stressful
I naively thought that stress levels would drop over the weekend, but that wasn’t the case for me — and neither was Trumdie or Eli. Eleanor, meanwhile, is very Zen — and I think it’s all because she does yoga.
Another colleague, Mauro Galluzzo of BBC Money, also took part in the experiment, but at a different time — the week of Christmas, when he was working every day. His stress levels remained roughly the same throughout this period. I feel strange because everyone thinks Christmas is supposed to be more relaxed. But he checks BBC Money’s Facebook page every day.
My weekends probably turned out to be because I spent so much of my free time working online, checking personal email, Posting on my personal account, and checking news streams. I spend the least time on my phone on Sundays, but a lot of time on my laptop. I spend almost the same amount of time checking my phone on Saturday as I do on weekdays, even though I’m out of the office all day and night. As expected, social media use is also an important part of my free time, just as it is at work.
There are two possibilities in my situation: either I use the Internet to escape stress, or the Internet causes me stress. Numerous studies have shown that stress can cause a host of physical and mental health problems. Can I do more to ease my weekend stress?
Checking your phone too much
On average, Eleanor checks her phone about 70 times a day. Incredibly, Trumdie sees it only seven or eight times a day; She responds to emails very quickly, so I think she uses her laptop more and has a lot of face to face communication. Studies show that young people check their phones about 85 times a day, so Eleanor is average, and Eli is similar.
My situation is not the same. I checked my phone 154 times on Saturday, compared to an average of 129 times on weekdays, and 76 times on Sundays. Don’t forget that I check my smartphone so frequently even with my laptop, which I use for at least six hours a day during the workday.
Part of the reason I check my smartphone so often is because I get so many notifications. I maintain nine social media accounts for work and personal life, so it’s hard to avoid the flood of information. I also use WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to chat with friends. I often even hear voices and think my phone vibrates or rings when it doesn’t.
I don’t worry too much about this figure, because I know that the number of times I check my phone doesn’t necessarily correlate with the amount of time I spend staring at the screen. My repeated checking of my phone may be more of a habit than a problem. I spent the most time on my phone on Tuesday, four hours and 34 minutes, but I checked my phone the least and my stress levels were lower than usual. Screen time is another issue, but it should also be considered – we’ve asked two leading psychologists on Facebook Live to analyze whether or not you should worry about it. On one day, Eli Gordon spent six hours and 11 minutes checking her phone, but she only checked it 88 times.
- I use my phone to escape from reality
I believe that a lot of my social media use — especially at the weekend or just before going to bed — is designed to distract me from some of my personal problems and concerns. Perhaps this can be seen as an indicator of technology addiction, but I know it’s not unique. When studying social media addiction, I looked at a study. Using a smartphone, it turns out, can make people happier, but only up to a point. I like to use Twitter to check the latest news and Instagram to see what my friends are up to, and use it to practice my photography skills. In fact, I find a lot of happiness with my phone, which is probably why I feel so fulfilled at work.
I spoke to Maggy Vaneijk, social media manager at BBC Three. She has just published a self-help book, is she “in a world defined by her depression ” how the pursuit of happiness. I asked her how she uses social media for mental health.
“I think your social media information will reflect your ideas. , “she said. She used to do what many of us still do: fall into the Joneses’ Instagram trap and lurk on the pages of her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriends. She later put their information into a safe space, there is a “a lot of golden retriever ” — she also thinks, “if feel depressed after you viewed the content, the inner pain, it should take measures. ”
“focus on someone you respect, but don’t envy. Since adopting this healthy mindset, I’ve found more like-minded people than just those who want to show off their engagement rings. ”
Still, she thinks she spends too much time online; She imposed a ban on the Internet during holidays, but found it difficult to do so during the week. “need to react to get the job done. ”
How about now?
Like Maggie Winnejak, I think I would be worse at my job if I hadn’t been consuming social media content. But if #LikeMinded taught me anything, it’s that it’s unclear just how far overuse of social networks leads to pathological problems. Psychologists use a questionnaire to get to know you whether there is a social media addiction, including two items related to me: obviously “I use social media to forget personal problem ” and “I spent a lot of time thinking about or planning how to use it ”. My whole job is to get people to read the content of BBC Future and BBC Culture online; Shouldn’t I be attracted to it myself?
If social media is causing people to become too stressed, it might be better for people like me to look at our jobs like professional wine tasters. We spend a lot of time online and there are links between this lifestyle and mental health problems and even addiction. Why aren’t all tasters alcoholics? They find work-life balance, establish boundaries and know where to draw them. They even take subtle steps, such as spitting red wine into a nearby bucket.
I’m really glad I was able to do this experiment. Comparing myself to others allows me to better understand myself and think about how to reduce stress. As part of # Linkeminded, we’d like to pose a question to our readers: What tips for a healthy and happy life have you gleaned from social media? We hope this encourages you to think about your online habits. Personally, something tells me that I still can’t give up my phone anytime soon.
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