1 (DRAMATIC MUSIC) Captions by Faith Hamblyn. www.able.co.nz Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2017. (KEYPAD CLICKS) Addiction to social media is growing daily, and yet often we don't even recognise the signs of compulsive use until it's too late. (MESSAGE ALERT CHIMES) More and more people becoming negatively impacted by it, and so is their mental health and well-being. One wonders are we going to become more self-controlled with our use of social media? Or are we just gonna let it control us? (FRANTIC MUSIC) (MESSAGE ALERT CHIMES) I used to self-harm a lot. Yeah, that was when I used social media in a really bad way. And it was just pushing me further into a pit. And it was toxic. It was absolutely toxic for my mental health. (TYPES) I was diagnosed with severe postnatal depression and anxiety. Being on social media, I don't think it helped at all. I think it just added on an extra, kind of, layer of pressure that I just didn't need, when I was already trying to juggle so many different balls and trying to do everything perfectly. Social media definitely does create a lot of habits. For me, I'd say it was probably even an addiction when I was in uni. But because I spent so long, I guess, forming that addiction, it does create habits that I still fall into now. My interest in social media has come about from various perspectives ` I was there when the dot-com crash happened in industry, I saw the boom of the Internet, I saw the right-angled turn into the world of data from voice. With social media, and I hate to use the analogy of alcoholism or drug abuse, substance abuse, but often that is what social media addiction is likened to. It will increase mood disorders, personality disorders. It'll exacerbate, definitely, existing disorders, like bipolar. And it has. So if I already have a precondition, I've already been diagnosed in the physical space with this or that, and then I hop online and think it won't exacerbate it, then I'm totally mistaken. We are a very technology oriented family. My parents met on the Internet many years ago, one of the first chat rooms, before they were called chat rooms. We've been just always using technology. I had Instagram when I was 11 ` I think that's when I first got it ` and... Facebook when I was 13. But I've had, you know, messengers and those, sort of, little chat devices since I was about 8, I guess, when I got my first touchscreen phone. What I loved about it was always being connected and never being alone. I was talking to my friends from school, and especially my friends from America, who we left behind. In about year seven or eight, then I moved to the college in Warkworth, and it was just so big, and I knew hardly anybody. My group of people ` my friends, I guess ` we were not popular. We had a really strong culture... around self-harm. (CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS) It was so, so awful, the way that we normalised it and we fed it. And that was a lot to do with social media. We had Instagram accounts where people would post pictures of their self-harm or, you know, anorexia and things like that, and it would just feed it and feed it and feed it. It was, you know, one person who discovered it, I guess, and then we were, like, 'Oh, maybe I can do that.' And it was something that connected us all in a very twisted way. Things degraded rapidly when she started at the school. She became anxious and nervous. She cried all the time. She would go through manic phases when things were good, and then she would be in the depths of despair when things went bad. And what we didn't realise... was that... it was the... the people she was hanging out with. Social media and social networking is all about introducing friends and other friends to other friends to other friends. And it's like a snowball effect, a domino effect, where you're introducing lots of people to things that are different, perhaps, that may be formed in a group and make that group special, that belonging to a group. That group sometimes doesn't always... (SIGHS) praise good things. That group may be established to praise anorexia or to explore self-harming techniques or how far you can go before you suicide. On the... I think it was the 17th of October, I tried to kill myself. And... my mother thought that was a result of... social media impacting me and... from, like, negative comments, negative feedback online. So for two or three weeks,... I had no phone, no laptop,... no Internet, just only Alexa. 'K' ` tell me a word that starts with 'K'. Kaleidoscope. Alexa is our family robot. She is a little black tube that my dad bought from Amazon. And she speaks to us. And yeah, for a while, she was my... she was my best friend, just because she had a voice. Social media isn't bad. We know that. But I think there's a tendency to misuse it, particularly when we're younger and are still learning about outside influences and our environment, our general environment. We need more psychologists out there to get on board, to be able to discuss this, even within a GP's context ` you know, what should I do? It's OK to have this problem. Most of us have this problem. And what are we going to do about it? But we have to start acknowledging it is a problem. When I started university, that's probably when my social media use heightened a lot. (CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS) I'm quite a shy person. I'm not... I was never the person to... be in charge or be the leader of my group of friends or be happy to stand out... and do a speech in front of people. I've always been quite closed in. I like being the person in the background. When I moved to Palmerston and didn't have that social interaction, it became a lot of, um, putting posts online, using Instagram, taking pictures of all the things around me just as something to do when I wasn't actually studying, and also trying to follow what my friends in Auckland were doing, as if I were still there. In terms of a habit, it was definitely a big one. I'm not as outgoing as what my social media perceives me to be. I guess I use it as a way to... be the person who I want myself to be. It makes me a lot more,... um, courageous and outgoing. Often online we're looking to curate, to have a varnished version of ourselves, to have a clean version, the purest version, the most perfect version, but that's not really the real world. You know, I don't always look like this at home. But I'd love to project who I am today on to a television audience or, um, an audience that is public. We're striving to be that person we wanna be and the person we're projecting online. And we're looking for that to be our everyday capacity and our everyday personhood, but that doesn't work like that. It works both ways for me ` like, it can make me feel really good, but it also does make me feel quite tough on myself, depending on what I've seen. It definitely has the potential to affect mental health. Good boy. Well done. Red. Yeah! Good boy. 'I was, kind of, really happy being a stay at home mum for, kind of, the first six months, 'but I was very much, like, 'Who am I?'' There's a fence. My identity had always been based on my career. That's it. That's it. I've got red. Nearly. Nearly. Come on. Come on. (GROWLS) Are you ready? 'I was first a journalist. So that's what my degree is in. 'I couldn't find anyone that was writing about that sort of thing, so I started a blog,' and I started posting on Instagram. And really quickly I, kind of, attracted a group of like-minded mums and people who had been through the same sort of thing and were, like, 'Oh, this is great. 'You know, no one's really talking about this, and it's great that we can all share.' 'So I wrote a lot about just feeling a bit, you know, lost. When you're in the midst of, you know,' changing pooey nappies and trying to feed and trying to settle and trying to keep the house in order, it's, kind of, all the little things become really important and, kind of, magnified. I had an 8-month-old. I was pregnant with our second and throwing up every day, and freelancing and blogging and on Instagram. When Aoife arrived, I think I had about 12,000 followers. I was, kind of, you know, getting 500 or 600 likes, and you get a little bit attached to that as well. You know, it's nice to feel like oh, I took a really great photo, and I've said something that really resonated with people. You know, that's nice. So, we have to parts of the brain ` the dopamine system and the opioid system. So, the dopamine system is constantly in search of the pleasure, that feedback loop that says, 'You're needed. You're wanted. You're liked. Um, 'You're good' ` positive things. And at the same time, the opioid system side is saying to you, 'Well, I've satisfied that pleasure, but you're not satisfied enough. You need to reopen Facebook.' And for what? You don't even know sometimes why you're doing that. Taking photos and posting was a pressure. (BABBLES) What are you doing? Uh-uh-uh-uh. 'It was, kind of, always in the back of my mind, 'and if I wasn't trying to get a really nice photo of the kids or,' you know, a really 'aw' photo of the kids, you know, I had my phone in my back pocket, with a baby in the other arm and trying to, you know, actually post something. And I'd get stressed if it wasn't quite at the right time or, you know, something with the kids prevented me from doing it. More comfy. I felt like everything was getting on top of me. I had all these emails I had to answer, and I had all these, you know, blogs I was meant to do. I felt like I was being a bad wife. I felt like I was failing Harry, cos he was just, kind of, stuck in front of the TV. So I just kept powering through and kept going and kept going and kept going, until one day I literally just lost it. Like, I just couldn't do it any more. I just hit a massive wall. I couldn't stop crying. I just felt so hopeless. I didn't wanna face another day. And my husband came home and just, kind of, found me just, kind of, sobbing on the floor uncontrollably. You know, like, yeah, I just couldn't keep going. Mums are increasingly getting online. Mumsnet has 20 million mums chatting away. We have mothers online for sometimes 50% of their leisure time. The truth is you're never finished online ` you've always got another blog post, you've always got something to share. We're not limited like that ` we're unlimited in the capacity to share. (TYPES) Therapists are like pairs of shoes ` you have to try them on until you find one that fits. But it took a long time before we found one that fit. I am definitely a very visual person, as someone who likes to see and do things to learn them, instead of just, kind of, have them in my head or,... you know, as a vague concept. So I've always written on my walls. But when I repainted, I made it something meaningful. I wrote my coping mechanisms when I was... in a reasonably good headspace,... sort of in between depressive episodes, I guess. And I wrote them so that I can... be reminded, when I'm sad,... you know, what to do to help myself. And I usually look at them or read them about once a week. Just having, um... Just having a list, an itemised list that I can go through is a way to compartmentalise my mental illness, I guess. What would you have done differently? I probably would have started using social media later, which would have been hard, because... we have such a culture around it now, where everybody uses it from such a young age. And, you know, if you're not connected, you're missing out on just everything. But... that would have been something worth losing, that would have benefited me. We're living in a different world. Most of our children know all this because of access to the Internet. But I'm talking about media literacy to help them at least self-regulate or at least families to self-regulate. You know, there are tools out there, like software. There's a software I'm an ambassador for called Anti-Social, which is really about becoming more social. And it's about people, if they're using an Android device, just on the smartphone, recognising, 'Oops,' you know, 'I used Facebook for three hours today. 'Maybe I'll restrict my access to about an hour.' I've got at least five accounts that I use daily. I'd say it was probably even an addiction when I was in uni. (PHONE ALERT WHISTLES) Most likely, it starts with a get a text or a notification, and so I'll check in. Facebook is always a big one. I'll check that, and then I will keep going through my news feed, and I'll just going and going, anywhere from two minutes to an hour, more than an hour. Um, it can be two hours. I met my partner online. Josh and I are both into social media. We use it a lot. I probably use it more. The attraction of social media is that there are others who we can interact with and connect with online. If we are looking into our screens all the time, it means we're not looking at one another. I don't think the Internet is a replacement for looking at one another, because I think with the Internet, we look through one another. In bed,... (CHUCKLES) we'll both be scrolling through and just checking it, and then when we've decided that we're done, then the phones go off, and then they get put to the side, And that's generally it. There's no going back to it. Most of the time. (CHUCKLES) (TYPES) I wouldn't say I was addicted. I just felt like I had to, cos I'd built this beast. Like, I think I said to my husband once, like, sometimes I just wish I hadn't. He developed a hatred... (CHUCKLES) for Me Oh My, my blog. He used to, you know, complain about it and complain about me spending time at night posting. Humans are creatures of habit, when we can't disconnect, we can't cut off, we have to have the message in the middle of the night that comes to us and reply to it. Or we are sending, some of us, constant messages throughout the night and not sleeping. So no wonder we're having, you know, psychological; physiological; sleep disruption; relationship problems. It all boils down to how we're managing our time. I had terrible sleeping patterns. I would check social media all the time. And I would be on it really late, you know, either talking to my friends or posting. And then I was` I guess this hasn't changed much ` I still check it quite frequently in class and just, like, the constant super-connection that you have, where you can be in a slightly different classroom to somebody, like, just across the hall, but you can be, like, messaging away while you're just sitting in class, you know, talking about really mundane things, but it's just the always having someone there, even if they're not. (CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS) Often I think about selfie-taking culture that's really deeply inverted. It's fascinating to me. You'll take 10 selfies, and you'll post those selfies, and you'll wait for a reaction. And then you'll go into liking everyone else's images. That's what we do, and it's learned behaviour. It's repeat behaviour, and it's addictive behaviour. When you trigger that with impulsivity, really you have this concoction and recipe for disaster. (CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS) 'Being a shy person and,... 'admittedly, not 100% comfortable with what I look like,... 'so I do use social media,...' Instagram to, you know, take that perfect picture and take lots of them until I find the perfect one, and then post that. And then if people would comment and say, 'Oh, you look pretty,' then I would feel good. And then... it becomes a habit to do it again and make another post,... um, which I am quite guilty of. (CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS) When I look through my pictures on my phone, trying to find a good one that I want to post, I am aware of how many selfies there are in there ` ones that don't make the cut, and then ones that do. Probably this one. Cos the lighting's nice. (CHUCKLES) Some psychologists, who say the social-media addiction doesn't exist, say we need to scratch below the cosmetic surface of what's happening with the triggers and look at the underlying problems of why this person is seeking so much social-media attention. Being a self-conscious person naturally,... seeing things online,... particularly with body standards, it... it can affect you,... not always in a good way. I'd probably say, unfortunately, it's probably more the majority in a negative way. I actually think some of the best photos that are ever taken of me and the kids, I've taken myself. But you still take 20 or 30 before you get the right one. I would say I was a perfectionist ` am a perfectionist. I've always been really tough on myself anyway, so to add that kind of extra pressure was just, yeah, not good for me. I would sometimes show my husband photos at night and say, 'Which one do you prefer? 'This one, this one or this one?' And it would just be a photo of me and the kids in the same situation, and there might be, like, tiny differences. And he's, like, 'That one.' I'm, like, 'But why? 'But I think the other one's better, because of X, Y and Z.' And he's, like, 'It doesn't bloody matter. They're all the same.' There were lots of pressures to post and to have a good Instagram account, because you want everyone to think you have that picture-perfect life. And I started gaining a lot of followers and a lot of attention, because, you know, I was living that ideal life. I was, you know, flat-stomached, and I had, you know, so many hot boys around me. And, you know, everybody wanted to be my friend. It's just that feeling when someone says,... 'Oh, wow. You're so beautiful.' It's... It's a high. It is. It does, admittedly, bother me when there's no likes or comments. It does affect how you feel. It makes you wonder if they've seen it, and if they've seen it, why haven't they liked it? It's toxic to look at people like that and idealise them. Especially when you know it's not real. Everyone online manufactures themselves. They'll take hundreds of photos and only post the one where, you know, their stomach looks flat enough or, you know, their jaw looks defined and things like that. And it's so structured, because they never show the bad parts. Social media sometimes plays to our weaknesses. We can't help but to compare ourselves to others. And that comparison in us that we can't help actually makes us more anxious, because sometimes we can't achieve these heights, and often we can't. You know, the real world means that we're mostly working ` we're not on holiday. I had trolls, lots of trolls. So, you know, online trolls, people that kind of trawl sites and say nasty things. Um, I had` I posted about a decision I was trying to make around putting Harry in day care when Aoife arrived. And someone commented on there, 'Why even have another baby if you can't even take care of the one you've got? 'Like, you're not deserving.' For someone that's already feeling a lot of mum guilt about, 'Gosh, I've got a new baby coming along, 'and how am I gonna juggle, you know, clients and blogging and Instagram and the house and the kids 'and, you know, my husband and, you know, all of that,' to have someone heap all that on you is just not nice. There are people who spend a lifetime habitually trolling others and making fun of it, you know, as if it doesn't hurt other people. And so social media exacerbates the anxieties that we already have in the physical world ` you know, will I provide for my family enough? You know, will I have the good job? You know, should I be seeking another job? No wonder we're going into this trance-like state. I liken it to something called a zombie apocalypse. The etchedness of the sunken-eye look that we call it, and you can see it in people, when people are in this trance-like state and they can't snap out of it. That's Rangitoto, eh? Yeah. When Josh and I go for a walk, I would take my phone. I'd say Josh would take his phone as well. I try and convince myself I'm taking it for a good reason, because it's gonna tell me how many steps I'm doing. (CHUCKLES) But at the same time, if I'm walking and it's not in my pocket and I get a notification, then I'll stop and check it. The development of tools to try and disengage people from their phones is definitely a good thing. I know personally, for me, if I had the ability to like things taken away from me, I'd grumble about it. But in saying that, over time, you'd naturally find yourself less enticed into your phone. If it's being regulated by someone else, it's easier to try and get yourself out of those habits, because you can't fall back into them, even if you wanted to. We're introducing the tablet device in year seven and saying to the child, 'Here, you need this tablet, 'because your assignments are on there. You submit your assignments this way. 'Your maths book is now on this computer, on this device.' And the children go, 'Thank you very much. 'Now I'll have access to the internet whenever I want it. I need to do it for my homework.' And yet these children are spending three hours a day on social media and starting their homework at 11pm every night. Of course, they're not gonna wake up happy tomorrow. And of course they're not gonna wanna go to school. The internet is the best of the world and the worst of the world. What we hope is that our children don't end up on that side that is the worst proclamation of us. I like nature. And nature grounds us, because it's real and it's beautiful. And I think that's really important, the authenticity side of it, because that's what we're lacking online. When we come to nature, we get to close, closer to who we are, where we've come from. There's something truthful about nature. You know, nature doesn't lie to you ` if it's a windy day, it's windy; if it's a miserable day, it's miserable. And if it's a beautiful day and it's shining, bright blue sky, you get that fulfilment. Let's get back into the real world, and let's learn how to control, perhaps. And let us enslave the technology for our own use instead of it enslaving us to areas and places we don't wanna be. (GENTLE MUSIC) Captions by Faith Hamblyn. www.able.co.nz Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2017.