Doomscrolling

Right now, people are living at a time with no easy solutions, a moment with a lot of conflicting “facts” in a rapidly changing landscape. According to Nicole Ellison, who studies communication and social media at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, that means there's a “lot of demand on cognitive processing to make sense of this. There’s no overarching narrative that helps us.” That, she adds, only compounds the stress and anxiety they're already feeling. 

 For years people have questioned the net benefits of platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and while some studies have found social media, when used responsibly, can have positive effects on mental health, it can also lead to anxiety and depression. Or, at the bare minimum, FOMO. And that’s just the result of looking at too many brunch photos or links to celebrity gossip. Add in a global pandemic and civil unrest—and the possibility that social media networks are incentivized to push trending topics into your feeds—and the problem intensifies. “In a situation like that, we engage in these more narrow, immediate survival-oriented behaviors. We’re in fight-or-flight mode,” Ellison says. “Combine that with the fact that, socially, many of us are not going into work and standing around the coffee maker engaging in collective sense-making, and the result is we don’t have a lot of those social resources available to us in the same way.”

...and this was written in late June, before the election added a whole new axis along which to freak out in the cortisol-soaked mess of 2020. People are basically soaking in fight-or-flight hormones for days and weeks on end. I wouldn't bet against a massive uptick in undiagnosed PTSD. 

Your brain can't tell the difference between swimming in a constant cortisol bath caused by being in a besieged city or the one caused by being stuck in your home, out of work, with your parents dead or dying in a nursing home, bills piling up, wondering if you caught the death flu on your last trip to the grocery store, all while you sit and constantly ingest news of how your city, state, country, and world are going in the shitter. 

There's no special "hero cortisol for first responders". Stress hormones are stress hormones, and extended exposure to them is detrimental, but most folks don't recognize this, which is why all this PTSD is going to go undiagnosed.

Serenity is hard to come by these days, and my demotivator from the earliest days of the blog feels just a bit too glib in 2020.

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