Welcome to Joy Lab!: Welcome to the Joy Lab podcast, where we help you uncover and foster your most joyful self. Your hosts, Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek, bring you the ideal mix of soulful and scientifically sound tools to spark your joy, even when it feels dark. When you're ready to experiment with more joy, combine this podcast with the full Joy Lab program over at JoyLab.coach
Henry: Hello, I am Henry Emmons and welcome to Joy Lab.
Aimee: And I am Aimee Prasek. Here at Joy Lab, we infuse science with soul to help you build your resilience and uncover your joy. And today we are talking about one key strategy to make your time on social media better for your health. And you may be thinking that the key strategy we're going to suggest is to stop using social media. Which can work for some folks, but that's not what we're gonna say.
There can be some good stuff on social media and we do wanna make space for that. So with that said, there's one really clear finding, however, when it comes to social media and mental health research, and it is a negative relationship, meaning the more time you spend on social media, the worse your mental health.
There are a lot of layers and subtleties there that we could explore, but I just wanna highlight one though that's relevant for what we're talking about today. There seems to be a duration that matters with maybe a max of 45 minutes where when you're using social media for less than that time, there doesn't seem to be a strong impact either way.
It might even be helpful for some of us.
Henry: Quick question there.
Do you mean 45 minutes straight or 45 minutes over the course of a day?
Aimee: Straight. That's
Henry: One episode of social media that's up to 45 minutes.
Aimee: Yep a duration, one dose of it. That's based on one study. There's not a whole lot of great research though on duration and then mental health impacts, but there it, except for the fact that as it increases, as use increases, mental health decreases. So anyway, there, there does seem to be, you know, a period of time where it can be beneficial for some folks. And what can be beneficial is that social media can help strengthen our social networks, our relationships, our sense of connection. And that matters. So if you're someone who wants to be on social media, then cutting it out entirely may not be realistic or even necessary.
Instead, we can certainly limit the amount of time as I just kind of noted. But one more key strategy here as we're talking about today, we can also shift how we engage with it. And that how is to shift from social comparison to social savoring. So social comparison is essentially when we evaluate ourselves based on someone else.
Social savoring is when we tap into positive emotions based on someone else's experiences. And actually social savoring is really sympathetic joy. They're synonymous, I'd say those terms, which is our December element of joy. I like this term though, of social savoring.
Henry: I love the term Aimee, did you just, did you make it up? Is this, uh, term attributed to Aimee Prasek.
Aimee: No, I wish, you know, I didn't. I, um, I first saw it in a study or a group of studies out of Duke and UNC Chapel Hill. It's under the work of Dr. Nancy Zucker. So I think they coined it. The first, I've seen it in 2023. It's the first time it popped up for me. So, new term. I'm loving it.
Henry: Oh, well, you're a you're a good researcher to attribute it to the, the right source.
Well, I was thinking about sympathetic joy when you were describing social savoring earlier. And I, in fact, I like your term better. Partly because I think we get tripped up by the word sympathetic.
Sounds kinda like we're feeling sorry for someone or it's a watered down form of compassion or something. But really it just means that we're feeling what they're feeling. And in this case, it might be something joyful. Sympathetic joy means that your happiness is also my happiness. And that totally fits in with the element of savoring.
Because if we can do this, if we can take joy in the happiness or success of others, it just adds to our own pleasure, our own happiness. It's a multiplier. Folks who listen to our earlier podcasts on sympathetic joy might remember that it is a concept that comes from the Buddhist tradition where it's often thought of as a skill that can be developed through practice. I consider it to be kind of an advanced practice, frankly, because for most of us in the West anyway, it's kind of hard to do. We have been so ingrained to see ourselves as individuals, as separate from others that I think when we see someone else who appears to be more successful or has more friends or simply looks happier than me, well we quickly go to comparing ourselves to them and feeling as if we fall short somehow.
And, if this is something we've practiced our entire lives, which most of us have, and um, what I'm gonna call the, the genius or the evil genius of social media is that it gets us to practice comparing ourselves to others so often and so quickly, that it's kind of like social comparison on steroids and frankly, who can resist that?
My point is that this is a lot for us to go against. And so we can't expect to change this overnight. You know? It does help to remember that this is a practice and like any skill it takes time to undo the effects that social comparison has. And it takes time to create something new like social savoring.
I really like it that we're highlighting this today, Aimee. I think it gives us a chance to see what's happening, to choose something healthier and to move toward social savoring. Maybe not all at once, but just one little step at a time.
Aimee: Yeah, as we say around here sometimes too, practice makes pattern and that's what we're working on. How can we reestablish, a new pattern? And you are spot on on the evil genius. I think this really is part of the algorithm that intentionally sucks sexist in. This is no mistake. Now on that as well, there's something unique about social media engagement compared to engaging in real life relationships, which is I think very helpful to think through, to be aware of.
And it has to do with these three types of social comparisons that are often noted in the research. And they are:
downward social comparisons where we perceive someone else as being worse off than us. Lateral social comparisons where we see someone as equal to us. And then there's upward social comparisons where we perceive others to be better off than ourselves.
And that last one, upward comparisons, overall, they tend to impact our wellbeing more negatively than the other two. Probably no surprise there, but there's something to note here. There are two types of upward comparisons and one is called contrasting upward comparisons, where we believe that the other person is better than us and we are flawed or lacking.
The other one is called assimilating upward comparisons, which can actually be helpful at times. And in this case, we still have that upward comparison seeing someone as better off than us, but we are able to identify similarities that we have with that person in such a way where we actually feel maybe motivated to achieve whatever it is
that we are identifying as different from our current status. Alright, so now think about social media and how folks present themselves. We don't get a lot of context. It's curated. It's really visual. So which of those social comparisons do you think show up more? What do we think? Upward? Contrasting? Yes.
Henry: upward and contrasting. You bet.
Aimee: Yeah, I mean, we see these folks as better off than us. We see ourselves as flawed and lacking. It just, it's like a little domino that goes off every time we see those images. And it does not matter if that person trespassed on some other random person's mansion. Made it look like theirs. Spent five hours putting on makeup. Four filters. Photoshopped the heck outta the, the photo. It doesn't matter. We usually just jump to the upward comparison. They have that or they look like that. I don't have that. I don't look like that. And then the conclusion is that we're flawed. Which makes sense then that, overall, research on upward social comparisons have found that really they're rampant in social media and they are consistently associated with more negative self judgments, lower self-esteem, more disordered eating behaviors, and higher levels of depression and anxiety. Rarely do we come out of the social media space feeling motivated.
Henry: You know, I think there's something really important happening here that mostly we're unaware of. And I might be reading too much into this, but bear with
Aimee: You're overthinking Henry.
Henry: I might be overthinking. what I'm seeing is happening at, at a meta level, which by definition is probably overthinking, but it meta means it's a higher level that goes above and beyond the social comparison or social savoring. And it's really more. I'm thinking more about the stories we create, the big stories, you know, the story of my life, the story of your life. The ones that we are writing and rewriting every single day. Social media is like this gigantic mirror in front of us, and it's saying:
look at what you're doing to yourself. Look at how you're taking these images, these little bits of information, and weaving them into the story of you. And look at the impact that that's having on how you feel about yourself. So it's a mirror that we can, we can use in a very helpful way, I think.
Now I don't believe that Mark Zuckerberg or any, any of the other leaders of social media set out intentionally to make us feel bad. I think they're probably pretty neutral in terms of the state of our own emotional lives. That's something we're doing to ourselves. But that's the beauty of how you just frame this, Aimee, if we can see what is happening here, if we can become aware of our own role in it, then maybe we can choose to do something different.
And it might be really powerful because it gives us an opportunity to practice getting out of our own stories. Or even writing them in the way that would we really want to in a way that's actually really helpful to us. Now, this might not be easy, but I think we can learn not to take everything so personally.
That's frankly, that's much closer to the truth. Whatever so and so is doing on social media has nothing to do with me. I just think it does, because I'm comparing myself to them. I'm probably doing that unconsciously and unintentionally. But as soon as I see that I'm doing this, then I can wake up and say, Hey, this isn't about me. This person looks like they're having a lot of fun, like they're having a great life and isn't that great?
Aimee: Yeah. We can change that story. We can change that next step. We could also mess up their algorithms. Now I'm thinking let's go after it. We can completely crash the system. Let's change the algorithm to reinforce these patterns of savoring. Um, your feed will look fundamentally different. We feel our feed can't remember who said it. I'll put it in the notes. So let's feel something different. Let's get into that practice. Alright. So what we're suggesting is that, this kind of savoring, social savoring or sympathetic joy, can dampen the negative effects of social media use.
So a recent study from Dr. Zucker, who I referenced earlier who coined this term I think maybe, but, um, Dr. Zucker and colleagues, used a social savoring intervention with social media use, and they found that more social savoring was associated with higher self-esteem, which is great. Like that matters a lot when we're looking specifically at the data with adolescent girls on Instagram, but back to your point actually on meta and overthinking, which I appreciate whenever you overthink Henry because I learn something. So, um, but back to that kind of unconscious nature, uh, of our tendency to compare, the researchers found that social savoring was not associated with the frequency of social comparisons.
I think this is really important to note- let me explain it. Even if someone was really doing great with social savoring, it did not necessarily decrease how often they compare themselves with others. But it did help change that next storyline. They were less likely, I think, to fall into that contrasting upward comparison that we noted earlier.
So we will sort of unconsciously compare ourselves to others, and that's okay. They have this, I don't, fine. It's what we do next. What story we fall into or begin to consciously rewrite that makes a difference. Dr. Leon Festinger highlighted this, a social psychologist.
Um, he had his social comparison theory. Interestingly, as well, Festinger also introduced a theory of cognitive dissonance. So his work was just ripe for social media environment. But Festinger's theory, social comparison theory, uh, has certainly evolved, but the core of it is that we are wired to compare ourselves to others. Which isn't a bad thing.
He gives this example of someone running from a lion. You watch someone being chased and then mauled by a lion. And then you determine, okay, I need to be able to run faster than that person. That's good information. So it's not really the comparison, that initial assessment of how we differ, it's what we do with it.
That assimilation aspect of an upward social comparison, we can use that information as a motivating force. We could turn our attention to that, perhaps. We could decide that we have working legs to, perhaps we can outrun that lion and we'll start walking, maybe running, or we could choose to savor the difference and celebrate it. Good for them. They outran that lion or whatever the lion is a metaphor for. A new job, maybe. Good for them. That's so awesome. I hope they're genuinely happy.
Henry: Isn't there a joke about some walking in the woods with a friend and a bear starts chasing you and then somebody says, "Don't run! You can't outrun a bear." And then you say, I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to run faster than than this guy.
Survival of the fittest.
Aimee: a perfect example of a downward social comparison. I can outrun that person and they're definitely gonna get eaten. Yes, that's social comparisons in real life.
Henry: Well moving on. Um, so I am, uh. I am thinking again of the prefrontal cortex. So quick refresher. The prefrontal cortex is this area right behind your forehead that has to do a, a lot to do with higher level or what's called executive function. And one of those functions is managing our emotions. So there is a binary aspect to that. Meaning there's a difference between left and right sides of the brain as there is in so many brain functions. And that essentially means that there are basically two options in the case of emotions. And I think it's fair to lump them broadly into feeling good or feeling bad. When you're feeling good, generally speaking, you're more open, more relaxed, more able to take in the good around you. In other words, you're, you're more likely to savor your life experiences. When you're feeling badly, you're more closed off, more fearful, maybe even kind of more focused on yourself, possibly more competitive with others.
And in other words, you're, you're more likely to compare yourself to others negatively. Let's say you've done some work on yourself. Maybe you've done the Joy Lab program or something similar, and then when you're on social media, you realize that you are feeling bad right in this moment because you're comparing yourself to others. You see it in real time right when you're doing it. Which I think is a very highly developed skill. And it gives you a huge advantage. So let's say you have become aware that you're doing this. And then you decide you want to feel better. Well, which is gonna be more effective... to tell yourself to stop comparing, just stop it. Or to decide that you want to shift your focus away from yourself and to the other person.
And I think, you know, intuitively, it doesn't work very well to focus on the comparing. Even if you're trying to step away from it, it is so much more effective to learn to celebrate somebody else's good fortune. In the long run, I think it's easier too.
Aimee: Yeah, so perfectly said. It is easier. It trains that transition from comparison to savoring in such a way that it becomes more rapid, more easy, and it can become more of the default. So to close our episode today, let's savor some wisdom from Thich Nhat Hanh. I think it ties up our conversation pretty well.
"Sometimes we believe that happiness is not possible in the here and now. That we need a few more conditions to be happy. So we run toward the future to get the conditions we think are missing. But by doing so, we sacrifice the present moment. We sacrifice true life.
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