Be careful what you click on.
The business model of social media is to weaponize fear.
The more clicks, the more profits. Angst and anger keep the average person glued to the screen, which turbocharges their revenue streams.
Your anxiety is terrific for a media company’s bottom line, not so much for your mental health.
The American Psychological Association outlines the clear and present danger in grim detail.
Chronic unresolved mental threat is a killer.
The background hum of worry that never fully closes — extends physiological stress activation far beyond what the actual event would produce. Im a meta-analysis of 86 studies, it was confirmed that worry and rumination independently predicted prolonged cardiovascular recovery after stressors, even after the stressor itself was gone.
That’s not all. Short-form videos are a form of mind pollution. Another study shows that watching short-form videos affects your ability to stop impulses and redirect your focus. And it hurts mental health, specifically increasing stress and anxiety.
In other words, the mind was stuck in rumination while the body had moved on. Of course, most anything in moderation is OK, but the algorithm game of designed addiction mocks the term.
The good news is you don’t have to be a victim of Big Tech’s head games. The rule is that if you click on it, you see more of it. Doomscrolling is a choice, not an obligation.
My experience verifies this theory. On Twitter, my feed overflows with NY Football Giants and Yankees news. In addition, there is a ton of health content, along with videos about gorillas and other primates wreaking havoc.
On Facebook, my timeline mainly contains information on Native Plants and instructional weight-training and boxing videos.
I don’t use Instagram, but I would think the results would be similiar to the above.
Of course, I follow finance people on social media. They are a highly select, respected few, and I intend to keep it that way.
Thinking before clicking keeps you away from the prophets of doom and the quagmire of partisan politics. Curating your social media toward the positive is one of life’s great mental health hacks.
Investors are no different.
Clicking on things like Doomsday Prepping. World War III, Plunging Futures, Stock Market Crash, Unpayable National Debt, Collapsing Dollar, AI Fears, and other assorted Yellow Journalism only feed the monster. The result is more hysterical content, which becomes increasingly hyperbolic.
There’s ALWAYS something sinister going on in the world and in the markets. We can add the Iran War to this chart.
Equity risk premium explains why the long-term return of stocks trounces those of all other asset classes by a wide margin. My colleague, Ben Carlson, says it best. Paying more attention to the news won’t change what happens.
Take agency over your curation. If you choose to get market info on social media, many provide public service with sound investment advice in a measured way. Our firm invented this form of messaging and has no equal.
At the end of the day, it would be far better for your health to watch a Gorilla eating a pepper and spitting out the seeds than to work yourself into a frenzy orchestrated by people who don’t have your best interests in mind.
It worked for me.
