Editor’s Note: How much time do we spend on Facebook, Twitter, this chat and that, etc, etc? Too much! Our time is is being sacrificed in front of screens of all sizes. These thing have become our gods and have replaced the real God of the Bible with electronic gadgets. Our eyes and minds have become dull to the hearing of His word. In essence the enemy of our souls has deceived many into believing this is OK when it is really a cunning ploy to get us away from seeking God and learning more about Him.
What about you? Bottom-line … are you saved?
“So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. ” -Rom 10:14 (NASB)
The following article was originally published by Michael Snyder at End of the American Dream. (Used by permission)
This Is What Social Media Is Doing To Us…
By Michael Snyder, on Sept 3. 2019
Scientific study after scientific study is showing that too much time on social media can be extremely harmful both mentally and physically. But even though most of us know this, very few of us actually alter our behavior in a meaningful way. When Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and other major social media platforms first emerged, we welcomed them with open arms. They were a lot of fun and they allowed us to interact with family, friends and society as a whole in ways that we had never been able to do before. But they were also extremely addictive, and they rapidly became transformed into dumping grounds for just about everything toxic, negative and malevolent that you can possibly imagine. Today, many of us spend far more time on social media than we do with real people, and as you will see below, that has enormous implications for our future.
A growing body of scientific research clearly indicates that spending too much time on social media can be very bad for us. For example, just consider what a long-term study that was conducted by Gallup over a period of two years ultimately concluded…
Holly Shakya, assistant professor at UC San Diego, and Yale professor Nicholas Christakis spent two years following 5,208 adults who are part of a Gallup long-term study. After asking permission, they monitored these subjects’ Facebook use directly from Facebook, rather than asking subjects to report their own use. (People often don’t realize how much time they spend on the social network.) And they checked in with subjects on their emotional and physical well-being, as well as their body-mass index (BMI), three times over the course of two years.
“Overall, our results showed that, while real-world social networks were positively associated with overall well-being, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with overall well-being,” the researchers wrote in a Harvard Business Review article. “These results were particularly strong for mental health; most measures of Facebook use in one year predicted a decrease in mental health in a later year.”
That doesn’t sound good at all.
If you knew that something was going to consistently degrade both your mental and physical well-being, would you engage in that activity every single day?
And yet most of us simply cannot go 24 hours without checking our social media accounts.
One way that social media is affecting our mental health is that it is making all of us a whole lot more impatient. Just check out what a survey of 2,000 British adults found…
Patience is a virtue, but it’s becoming an exceedingly rare quality in modern society. According to a new survey of 2,000 British adults, all of the luxuries of modern life have made most people incredibly impatient — across pretty much every aspect of their lives. Three quarters of those surveyed said they believe the dominance of digital technology, such as smartphones and on-demand TVs, are to blame for this ever growing lack of patience.
Respondents reported becoming frustrated after just 16 seconds of waiting for a web page to load, and after 25 seconds of waiting for a traffic light to change.
When I read those paragraphs, I found myself nodding my head in agreement.
These days, I have a hard time waiting for anything, and I always feel like I am in a hurry.
Can you identify with that?
I have a feeling that many of you can.
Another study that focused on teens found that “emotional investment in social media was strongly correlated with higher levels of anxiety”…
A study of more than 450 youth aged 11 to 17 found that 97 percent of participants indicated that they used social media. Thirty-five percent of participants were categorized as poor sleepers. Forty-seven percent of participants were identified as anxious. Also (and here’s the kicker), higher emotional investment in social media was strongly correlated with higher levels of anxiety.
Do we really want our young people to be bundles of nerves? Anxiety continues to be a growing problem in our society, and it appears that social media is playing a major role.
In addition, yet another study that was conducted not too long ago discovered a direct link between social media use and increased levels of depression and loneliness…
A new study concludes that there is in fact a causal link between the use of social media and negative effects on well-being, primarily depression and loneliness. The study was published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.
“What we found overall is that if you use less social media, you are actually less depressed and less lonely, meaning that the decreased social media use is what causes that qualitative shift in your well-being,” said Jordyn Young, a co-author of the paper and a senior at the University of Pennsylvania.
Today, Americans take more anti-depressants than anyone else on the entire planet. “Deaths of despair” have hit an all-time record high in our nation, and all around us people seem so incredibly unhappy.
—————— { END OF MICHAEL’S ARTICLE EXCERPT } ———————
Fear God and Flee from Evil!
-BPWatcher, Internet Preacher and Bible Prophecy Watchman
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem – Psa 122:6 (KJV)