If you feel like your mental faculties are slowly slipping away, you may be right. Research has shown that every time we flit between Instagram, emails and Tiktoks, our IQs suffer. Studies show that being distracted by an unread email temporarily reduces your IQ by ten points. To put this in perspective, smoking cannabis only reduces it by four.
The average 24 -35-year-old whips out their smartphone 43 times a day and with the attention span of a typical internet browser now being just 15 seconds, it is now considered normal to spend hours and hours mindlessly browsing and endlessly scrolling through multiple social media feeds. The result of this is that our brains get ‘fried’. According to Professor David Meyer, a cognitive scientist at University of Michigan, humans are not wired to be able to successfully multitask. When we think we’re doing two things at once, – say, playing Candy Crush and watching a TV show – our brains are actually rapidly switching from one task to the other and the mental effort has adverse effects. Simply put, the digital habits millions of people have developed are dulling our brains.
So why can’t we just resist the urge to ‘multitask’? Daniel Levitin, author of The Organised Mind explains, ‘Over time, we become addicted to the constant stimulation and it makes us want to seek ever-increasing levels of new things and new information – to the detriment of our ability to concentrate.
It may feel good at times but the mental effort needed to toggle between a dozen internet tabs causes your body to release cortisol, the stress hormone. If we lived in the Ice Age and confronting sabre-toothed tigers were a common occurrence, then cortisol would be very useful as it stimulates your fight-or-flight response. However, your inbox is not the kind of enemy you can fight or flee from so cortisol levels can build up. This build-up can lead to a range of nasty side-effects such as making you irritable and aggressive, impairing your memory and suppressing your immune system. Other side-effects include weight gain and reduced libido.
Despite knowing all of this, I know that a lot of people will continue with these habits. Afterall, social media platforms have become such integral parts of our lives that it would be almost impossible to lead our professional and personal lives if we were to stop using them altogether. However, apps like Freedom present a solution. Developed by tech CEO Fred Stutzman, Freedom allows you to temporarily disable the internet while you’re working. If you’re chuckling about the irony of using an app to help with technology addiction, you could try low-tech fixes such as setting 45-minute timers during which you’re allowed to focus on only one task. Alternatively, you could take regular breaks to go on short walks, do some exercise or have conversations with someone off-screen.
SophisticateQueen 