 It's actually unbelievable that we, that's happening all over the world to billions of people that these pixels of light on a rectangle that we can fit in our pockets are dictating how we behave and how we think. That is so insane. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Oh, do I do the intro thing? No, wait, I gotta just say one thing. I'm done. Oh, I'm done and it feels good to be done for a little bit. Seven years on YouTube, uploading a video every single week, setting up camera, lighting, editing, aperture settings, ISO settings, backdrop, uploading, naming, thumbnails for seven years, bruh. I'm done receiving an email every single day from someone who's suicidal around the world, who needs help with depression, they had nowhere else to turn except this random dude on the internet. Seven years every single day, I'm done. I'm taking a break. Now, call me stupid. Absolutely, that's a stupid thing to do to not take a big break for seven years and just continually uploading videos. So dumb, so stupid, but am I grateful? Because it brought me to this moment. Where I'm taking a nice break from social media and I probably won't ever return. That's what we're going to talk about. I'm going to talk about why social media could be the actual cause, why you're experiencing anxiety more than you'd like and depression, low self-esteem, a feeling of worthlessness and lack in your life, which I believe is one of the worst feelings in the world. Yeah, absolutely. So we're going to get to that and I didn't say correlation. I said causation meaning more social media usage and how you use it causes depression, causes anxiety. Now, if I were some professor looking to bore my students who are paying thousands of dollars in tuition, I would put up some graphs and charts speak in a monotone voice. This is what happens when you consume social media too much. Look at the increase in depressive symptoms. Look at everybody in the lecture hall. Thank you for paying money to listen to me. I am a researcher, but I am a professor, meaning I have no skills to teach you this. I do not know how to present. I do not know how to engage. I'm using the university as a research institute and have absolutely no, absolutely, no, absolutely, no skill whatsoever to teach. Okay, so if I were a professor, any of you have been to university or college, put your hands up and if you know what I mean, yes, get some real teachers in there to teach subjects, researchers, don't be professors, just stick to your research. Anyways, so I don't want to bore you with graphs, charts, numbers as to why you should get off social media. That's going to bore you to tears and it's not actually going to change your behavior. Of course not. Information doesn't change behavior. Repeat after me. Information, repeat after me, but don't slur. Information doesn't change behavior. Why do you think there are still 50% Republicans, 50% Democrats in the U.S.? They've been trying to change each other's minds for decades. What happens? It's the same. You need to experience a change in order to believe it, all right? No one's changing my mind showing me verses of the Bible to say that Jesus is the Son of God. That's rarely how that works. Someone needs to experience the Holy Spirit within them. They need to experience God and then they're sold and you can't change their mind ever again. So I'm not going to give you a bunch of information here. I'm going to talk about my own experience with social media and then I want to ask you some questions about your own usage and whether it is causing you to be more anxious than you'd like, more depressed than you'd like, all right? Let's get started. So welcome to the Depression 2 Expression Podcast. Yeah, Scott St. Marie here. All right. So I'm quitting social media until March. I thought I'd start the New Year real fresh because there's something about having an Instagram or Facebook or TikTok profile where you feel obligated to share. And I think that's one of the downfalls of social media for sure in the time that we live in is nothing happened unless it's shared. Something didn't happen to you unless it's shared. You go on a trip. You gotta share the pics. You do something cool. You gotta share the pics. Did you bake your first cake? Pie? Did you get a new puppy? Well, you gotta tell the world because the world needs to know that you have a great life, that you're doing it, that you're doing life and you're doing it the right way. Oh, the validation, the reassurance we get from posting and seeing views, seeing that another person saw the thing that I'm doing. Yes. And we get a dopamine rise and those neurotransmitters are firing. And then they level off a little bit. And we're like, uh, I'm just alone with my thoughts and my life is just normal. I gotta share something again. I gotta share something again. Okay, post. Oh, I get likes. Oh, I get views off feeling good again because I'm feeling validated. And then neurotransmitters fire and then they decrease once again. And we feel this sense of lack. We feel like we're in limbo between the online world and the offline world and we don't know where we should be, where we fit in. What do we share? How do we share it? What kind of picture do we send? What should it be? A video? A gift? How do we get the most engagement? Do we share with just friends or the entire internet? And do I know the line between not sharing something and sharing something? When do I know just to share something with my spouse? When do I know just to keep something to myself and enjoy the moment? See, these are the questions that we kind of have to ponder milliseconds at a time before we actually post something. And with kids, this is why kids getting so much trouble with social media is their brains, literally the frontal lobe is not developed enough to actually have this kind of critical thinking before you share something. I can think to high school, elementary school, the stupid things I did and the stupid things you did. And why did we do them? Because we weren't thinking. And why weren't we thinking? Because we literally didn't know how to think. We didn't know how. The brain processing just wasn't there. So we made some real dumb decisions. Real dumb decisions. And that's okay. That's part of life. That's part of learning. But with social media, even the older we get, we can still think critically. But now we feel obligated to share and we feel like we're just being, as Bilbo Baggins would say, just butter over too much bread. It's just spread too thin. So I've been feeling spread very thin lately and feeling obligated to share things about my life because people so curious about how this guy got over depression and the emails I've been getting ever since I just uploaded that video of getting off antidepressants, people like, how, how, how, please spread too thin. I can't help everybody and I don't want to help everybody. So getting off social media has been and will continue to make me realize that life can unfold just for me. Call it selfish. Call it self care. Call it what you like. I don't really care. The moment is just for me. I'll go for a walk. I'll see something amazing and I won't have my phone with me. And when I went, I remember I went camping with some friends and they all brought their cell phones and they thought I was crazy for not bringing my cell phone for like a three day camp. They thought I was insane. Nope. And you know, I told you when I go to any kind of new country or travel, I always bring my old digital camera and I'll bring a compass and a map and the less phone usage, the better, man. I'm not a big fan of these rectangles with pixels most of the time. So being off social media for me, I go for these walks and I'm not obligated to share. I'm not thinking of a random follower, someone who doesn't even know me. And it's really weird when you think about it. Why am I trying to please all these people that don't know a thing about me? I don't know a thing about them yet they follow me and they subscribe to me. And why am I ruining the moment for me and trying to capture this and make it last for somebody else all the time? And I've been doing that for too many years. And what you realize when you get off social media and take a break from the online world is you feel a little more grounded, but the moment's just for you. How awesome is that? It's like the sun rises just for you and it sets just for you. And the cool thing you saw, these two people in Walmart fighting and one just like just clobbered the other and one has shit stains and one's wearing flip-flops in the middle of winter and you got to see that all yourself and you don't need to share it. It's just for you. It's a cool feeling being off social media. And I really think I'm going to continue this. In March when I'm just doing a 90-day thing, but there are ways that I can use it while still having those moments just for me. Like I can hire someone to just do posts for me and share podcasts and all of that. But when we talk about low self-esteem, increasing rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, eating disorders, orthorexia, these are things that have been increasing ever since Facebook, ever since the iPhone came into existence, especially increasing rates of loneliness, which will be a separate podcast episode. Highly recommend it. Haven't recorded it yet, but stay tuned. Make sure you subscribe. We really, really need to analyze kind of since that time and since that usage, there are so many different factors in the world of technology that have changed. And we need to really look at, okay, why are these kinds of mental illnesses and mood disorders increasing? And if we look at social media, bingo, bingo, cause. You need to look at Jonathan Haidt's work, The Coddling of the American Mind. Go buy it. Please go buy it. Support an author. Support a scientist. You also need to look at Gene Twenge. I think it's Twenge or Twenge, iGen. Please look at that. The art of screen time. I forget who wrote that one. But there are so many resources and so much data out that really suggests this causation between social media use and low self-esteem. And they've done multi-generational polls between people before they had a phone and they got a phone. And then this is how I feel after I got a phone. So why is this the case though? Why does this happen? Well, if you look at social media and what it's actually designed to do, it's designed to make you feel a lack. It's designed to make you feel jealous. That's the way you actually increase engagement on these platforms. If you feel good without your phone and without social media, the platforms lose. They don't exist. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, they go under, man. So the point is, how does Facebook, how does Snapchat, how does Instagram, how does WhatsApp now, how do these platforms get you to use them more often for longer periods of time? How do they keep you on there so you can watch more ads, consume more content? And so Facebook has more data points on you that they can sell to advertisers. How do they do this? It's by creating that feeling of lack within you. You're never full. You're never enough. Hands up if you feel that if you're on social media. Like you're never enough. You had a great day today. You feel, you accomplished something amazing. You ran 5K. You've never ran 5K before. You did it in record time. And then you go online and you see someone who just ran 15K in 15 minutes and he has no shirt on. He has coconut oil on his abs and his dick is probably massive. Now, how do you feel about your life right now? Not too good. Not too good. Even though you did the personal, your personal best, now you know with your own eyes and there's proof now that there is better out there and it's right in front of your face looking at you saying, your shit. That wasn't enough today. That's what social media does. Creating that lack. And I would argue that that is one of the worst feelings in the world. It's not a lack of material goods, although we get jealous all the time from that on social media. This person just bought a house. This person just got engaged. This person just had their first child. This person's on vacation. This person has a new car, et cetera, et cetera. But the feeling of lack that is the worst feeling in the world is like, as a human being, we're not enough. As a person, we're not enough. Our soul, what makes us, us, what makes me, me, what makes you, you, isn't enough. Now, can you see why that would cause depression? Can you see why that would cause anxiety? Anxiety, the feeling like we're rushed, like we're running out of time, like we're never going to meet this standard of well-being that other people have achieved online? Can you see how that causes anxiety and this raced pace for life, this hustle, this go, go, go, go, go? And can you also see how that can cause depression for other people? Thinking that I'm never going to be enough. I'm worthless. Why even bother? The best is already out there. What do I have to offer? I'm never going to be that good. Nobody cares about me. Even if I ran 10K and that person only ran five, they got more likes than I did. Shouldn't I get more since I ran further? So there's this competition, this feeling of jealousy and lack, and that's exactly what social media companies want from you. They want you to feel like shit. Ding, ding, ding, and they win. Oh, they win big time. Every time there's a new person saying, I have depression, Zuckerberg's like, hell yeah, baby, we got one. Oh, he's going to be scrolling passively for a long time. Let's keep him depressed. Let's keep him depressed. Okay, keep the Facebook algorithm going. Okay, show him happy shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, show him things that he doesn't have. Yeah, now watch. Okay, make him scroll to that person he went to high school with. Yeah, yeah, that just got married and he's single, right? Yeah, he's single. He has no one. Oh, his grandpa just died. Perfect. Okay, show that new married couple at the altar with their grandpa by their side. Yeah, yeah, show him that one. We got him. Oh, man, he just self harmed. No, seriously, that's how it works. That's exactly how it works. We're never enough. And the highlight reels of other people are being shoved down our throats and in our retinas 24 seven as much as you use your phone. And that shit lasts through the day. That lasts a long time. And here is the thing, my friend, that I'm with you in that a lot of people can deal with that. So I think like you are a superhuman if you can be on Twitter all the time, if you can be on Facebook and still be a happy individual. That's something I can't do. I can't be that person. I know myself well enough that I don't deal well with that. You know, I am a competitive person. I am a workaholic. And if I see someone else succeeding where I wanted to succeed, it rubs me the wrong way sometimes. And I'm not good at that. So social media, man, it's just not for me in that way. And for you, ask yourself the question, why am I on social media? Am I getting jealous of others while I'm on there? Am I feeling this lack that I'm not good enough? And if you have that lack, have you contributed it to social media? Even if you think, no, there's no way I only subscribed to these things and it's all positive content, even so, even so. You don't know you're plugged into the matrix until you get plugged down the blue pill or red. I forget and get that. I still don't understand that scene in the matrix where Neo puts his fingers in the mirror and then he turns into the whole mirror himself. I don't get it. Help me out. You don't know how much it's affecting you negatively until you get out. If there's one thing I recommend to parents when I do presentations to parents, I'm like, don't give your kid a phone. A lot give their kids phones between grades four and five. I'm like, please don't. If and when I have kids, they aren't getting a phone until they can afford it themselves. That's for sure. And if they feel left out because all the other kids have it, so be it. If all the other kids go to school naked because it's like the thing to do, I'm still going to put clothes on my child. They might feel left out not having their wang out, but you know, it's like I'm not following trends just because it's a trend. Why do you think I'm not growing a beard? I don't want to follow the trend. Every dude is growing a beard. I'm not growing a beard. Don't tell me how to live. So that's the other thing. Social media creating this lack in your life that you're not good enough that no matter what you do, you're not reaching the bar. And God, that's exhausting. That is draining in the human spirit and soul. You could never feel like you're enough and you're always in limbo being stretched, butter over too much bread, right? And then the other reason is there's the addiction piece. I don't really want to get into that, but you know, your neurotransmitters are just mangled man and burnt out. But there are so many data points that Facebook, Instagram, same company and WhatsApp, same company, but Snapchat and TikTok now and YouTube and Google, they have thousands and thousands and thousands of data points on you while you surf the internet online, right? Even if you're not logged into Facebook, right? Even if you're not on the Facebook page, they know exactly what you do online, right? There's Facebook pixels everywhere. I used to install them on websites when I worked for a social media agency and same with the Twitter pixel, right? And Snapchat has a pixel now, just a snippet of code. And they know exactly what you're doing online. They know how you behave online. They actually know what you do offline. Google knows where you go, how long you go for, where do you go? You stopped at the McDonald's, okay, you got this kind of coffee, okay, because your credit card knows exactly what you bought, okay, then you went downtown, you stopped at this little place, you bought this, you walked around, and you went into this store, and then you went on Facebook, then you went on WhatsApp, message this person, call this person, they know exactly what you're doing online and offline. So here's the scary thing. What decision are you making that is solely your decision? When was the last time you made a decision that came just from you? That's a difficult answer in question, because most of the ideas that we have in our minds aren't ours anyways, they come from other people. That's the whole meme thing with Richard Dawkins. It's passed down, it's what we've read, it's what we've listened to, it's how we were brought up. But with social media, you are so less in control than you think. Are you making a decision based on what you really want, or is it something that has been fed to you slowly, but surely, through your social media feeds, through what you've seen, through what you've experienced, through watching other creators, and what they've been wearing, and then what you've bought and where you've gone. There are so many data points that Facebook and Google have on you that they can slowly tweak your behavior by changing your feeds, by changing the content you consume. They can literally change how you behave and how you think. I have a perfect example of this, a personal example. I'm going to say that for another episode, it's how basically I got so sucked into conservative media, like I know way too much about US politics than I should. I got so sucked in, and my feed was just Stephen Crowder, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and then it was like, I can't wait to do another episode on that. But it's amazing how YouTube and these social media companies can manipulate the way you think and the way you literally see the world, because your reality is your own. Based on your thoughts and experiences, you see the world like no one else sees it. So what decision have you made that was solely your decision? And I want you to think about that, long and hard, as what she said. Think about it. What was the last time you made a decision just for you based on nobody else's input or the input of the internet? So the reason social media is causing anxiety and depression is based on these data points that Facebook has and they can completely tweak the algorithm to make you feel like shit, jealous, and more competitive than you actually are to keep you going back to the platforms. Their job is to make you feel like garbage. They've done the job. And then of course we have this comparison game that we always play with other people online thinking that they're sharing just their regular life. No, people are just sharing their highlight reels. They're just sharing the best things that happen to them and you're left on the couch at 3am eating a pogo with old Dijon mustard that tastes like shit and you're like, damn my life sucks. That's a bad example because if you're eating a pogo at 3am with old mustard, your life isn't the best, I guess. So maybe that's not a good example, but even if you're in a good position and you see someone else doing something better, that just messes with the mind. That just messes with you psychologically that you're not good enough, that there's better out there and you're not the best. It's so manipulative and that's what it is. It manipulates your thoughts and your mind. So what can we do about this? Well, what I'm doing is always the extreme, man. I go for the extreme because I want to know the human condition, which is why I went off my medication called turkey, which is why I went off social media called turkey and I'm doing it for three months. I'm not suggesting you'd have to do that. What if you just went off social media for the day? What if you didn't use your phone for an entire day? Phone usage is another whole topic. Just screen time alone affects how we feel and behave and sleep especially. What if you just went off it for a day? How would you feel? That addiction is real. If you can't go a full day without looking at your phone, without holding your phone, pure addiction, pure addiction. So who has the control here? You're going to let a bunch of pixels control and dictate your life. That's sick. That is absolutely sick. I'm with you though because it's controlled mind and it's sick. It's actually unbelievable that's happening all over the world to billions of people that these pixels of light on a rectangle that we can fit in our pockets are dictating how we behave and how we think. That is so insane and we give them the power. We don't even challenge it. We hear a ding, we run to our phone like a little pussy. Damn it, we're weak, aren't we? That's addiction for you. That's addiction and oh you feel good when you finally get to see who messaged you and you get to calm down and the dopamine rushes. It's a pure addiction. Recognize that it's an addiction. Take control of the phone. Don't let the phone control you. Social media causes depression and anxiety. 100% it does. Depends who you are, depends how you use it of course. We go over studies of people using social media more passively are more likely to actually experience low self-esteem than those that actually engage in conversations blah blah blah. That's not important. What's important is you taking a little bit of a test here of how social media is fitting into your routine. How is it impacting your relationships? How is it changing your way of thinking? You probably get up in the morning, the first thing you do is look at your phone. You probably go to bed. The last thing you do is look at your phone. Is that healthy? Is that useful for you? Is that serving you in the best possible way to achieve your goals? If you're dealing with depression, is that helping you with depressive symptoms? Is that changing your life in any way? If you're dealing with anxiety, is that helping you sleep a little better? I'm not answering that question. You have to answer that one yourself. Start with good questions. That was my whole TEDx talk, which was a fun thing to do at the time. Ask good questions. You're going to get better answers. Ask yourself the role that social media is playing in your life. Is it good, bad? If it's bad, done. Get rid of it. End of story. Well, that's it. So if you enjoyed the episode, please share it. Leave a review on iTunes. Share your Spotify account with other people. Get them to listen. I don't know. What else am I supposed to ask you to do? Share it on social media, I guess. But you won't share this on social media because it's called the Depression to Expression podcast. And you don't want anybody knowing that you listen to a mental health podcast. Maybe stigma is real. Or is stigma real? Or is it that we ourselves are insecure? We always think that stigma is out there. It's other people. No, stigma is us. We fear judgment for sharing this podcast, don't we? That someone's going to laugh at us? That someone's going to put us down? Judge us because we listen to a mental health podcast? Think about what stigma actually means and why wouldn't you share something like this? Or anything on any mental health programming? Anything that comes out in mental health awareness week? Anything mental health? We don't share it. Ask yourself why. Interesting, eh? Why don't we use social media for good in that way?