Is Your Internet Use Killing Your Productivity and Making You Depressed?

We’ve expanded our minds. It’s no longer contained inside our heads — it now includes our devices, social media, and essentially anything digital. While the connectedness available to us today has opened a number of doors, it’s not always a good thing. We no longer have time to think and create our own ideas. In fact, too much digital connectedness can be a bad thing — for our mental health as well as our creative ventures. Constant surfing and intake of bite-sized information crowds out time for contemplation. Because of neuroplasticity (which is the ability for our brains to change), the more we use the web, the more we train our brains to be distracted. As a consequence, we then rely even more on the net because we have trouble remembering. We don’t need to recollect anything. Most people are constantly attached to a smartphone, which has become a portable brain. Over-dependence and overuse of all-things-digital not only impacts our capacity for concentration and contemplation, it has changed the way we think. The internet is a fire hose of information, but we can only transfer a small portion of that to our long-term memory. Rather than deep complex thought developed by a coherent stream of one thing at a time, we receive drops of information. All day long. As we invite this scattered information into our minds, the result is less time for reflection. And the multimedia nature of the information we invite in further strains cognitive abilities. Absorbi...
Source: World of Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Depression Habits Happiness Memory and Perception Mental Health and Wellness Mindfulness Minding the Media Psychotherapy Technology attention Cognition Facebook Loneliness Memory Loss Reflection Sadness social media Twitt Source Type: blogs