Archive for month: February, 2019

 

A high school senior recently contacted me for insight regarding his thesis on Teens and Social Media. Here are my answers to several fundamental questions on this topic:

What causes Internet addiction? 

First of all, it is important to understand what an addiction is. It is the psychological and physical inability to stop a repetitive behavior such as cigarette smoking, overeating, drug or alcohol consumption, or use of the internet. In the case of teenagers, participation in social media is a cultural mandate. Where I think most teens get hooked is through approval seeking from their peers. The number of likes you get or other feedback becomes a currency of being valued by others.

One of the great problems of human consciousness is seeking approval from outside of ourselves rather than from within ourselves.  

In the absence of a secure sense of identity and self-worth, teens are extremely vulnerable to the perceptions of their peers.
Why do you think teens are addicted to social media?

Social pressure is enormous for teens and plays a major role in self-perception. In this particular social moment, this drama is being played out in the world of social media. You’re either in the game, or you are perceived to be lame. Hiding behind anonymous accounts gives some teens a sense of freedom and power to say things they would never have the guts to say face to face. 

Teen reputations are made and broken in cyberspace and what has been done can’t be undone. 

For those on the top of the social hierarchy, this gives a false sense of popularity and self-worth. For those who are bullied, ignored, or simply not perceived to be cool enough, it can be a living hell. In the absence of monitoring and guidance from parents and teachers, it’s a free- for-all. The pressure to participate has become a social norm and is therefore non-negotiable. Once you are in this game, you learn to care too much and give too much value to the opinions of others, which causes you to lose any sense of personal autonomy and power you had.  All is in the hands of others and you end up not simply being who you are, but playing to an audience who gets to decide whether you matter or not. It’s a very sad state of affairs.

Do you recommend any websites/articles/books about Internet addiction? 

Yes. Watch a 60 Minutes segment entitled “Screen Time” which aired on 12/9/2018 and read the book, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales.

What is the solution to internet addiction?

There is no easy solution to any kind of addiction. Every form of addition takes hold through the same process. Someone wants, and believes they absolutely must have, whatever it is that that particular path of addiction appears to offer – an ongoing source of a high, validation, or the acquisition of a material thing or status associated with a particular job or relationship. Unfortunately, the addict’s appetite is never sated. If the addict has 500 “friends” on Facebook and someone else has 732, the addict won’t be satisfied until acquiring more friends. Then someone else has more and so on and so on. Once an addict can’t do without their addiction, they are powerless to break free of it.

There are treatment programs and medications that can help, but nothing will break an addict free until they undergo a change of mind. 

This often involves transferring their addiction to something else. However, in order for the addict to let loose his or her grasp of that which they are addicted to, they will have to come to value something more. Ideally, they will choose sobriety, self-worth, or some other self-empowering path. However, many will go from one addiction to another for one reason only – the underlying condition that drove them into their addiction has not been resolved. Typically, that condition is a mostly unconscious collection of thoughts, beliefs, and feelings whereby the addict perceives him or herself as not good enough – not a worthy human being in their own right. This fundamental fear or belief makes these people ripe targets for addictive substances and behaviors. Many industries such as fashion, weight loss, cosmetics, and the latest ‘must-haves’ in popular products all feed off of people’s insecurities, which in turn are the driving force behind most addictions.

If I could help teens to avoid internet addictions, here is what I would want them to know:

  • Your relationship with yourself is probably not very solid yet, so you have to be careful not to fall for anything that suggests that you are less than fine just the way you are.
  • Your value cannot be measured by internet ‘likes.’
  • Your coolness cannot be proven by either publicly or privately posting sexy photos of yourself. Anyone who asks you to do so is not asking out of love and affection for you, but rather in an effort to score points with ‘friends.’ Don’t give yourself away so cheaply.
  • If you really care about how many ‘likes’ you have, you are an internet addict and need to get busy working on your sense of self-worth separate and apart from what other people think about you.
  • The price of popularity is often valuing other people’s opinions of you more than being true to yourself. 
  • Most of your current real and internet friends will come and go out of your life, but you will live inside yourself every breath for the rest of your life. Make friends with yourself. Focus on appreciating and developing who you are and creating a peaceful and happy inner mental and emotional environment.
  • Be discerning. Think for yourself. Don’t let the marketing campaigns of big companies or the internet movers and shakers define you based on whether or not you follow them. Become your own best friend. Overcome the desire to reject any part of yourself as unworthy. You exist just the way you are. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. Have the courage to be who you are. Nothing will ever make you more cool than you already are. Take up residence in yourself without apology. Take dominion over your opinion of yourself.

    The only way to break free of an addiction is to reprogram the mind that is caught up in the illusion that the addiction gives you something you need. 

 

Years ago, I remember being disturbed by my spiritual teacher, John-Roger, describing love as activating or stimulating that place inside of each other where love resides. It seemed so unromantic. I had been raised to believe in the Valentine’s Day romantic version of love where you find love outside of yourself in that one special person who lights up your world and then, as the fairy tale goes, you live happily ever after.

What if love serves a different purpose in our lives than that? What if love is a kind of awakening of something that lives inside each of us? What if others who rouse that place of loving inside of us are simply serving us by reflecting to us the best that is within us? What if the point is not to find and grab ahold of one special person, but rather to figure out how to shine our own inner light of loving on as many people as possible to do our part to heal this world?

This is by no means a prescription for either sexual promiscuity or exclusivity. Sexual expression is a separate matter entirely. However, whether you are two friends, family members, or romantic partners, there is a fine line between a healthy relationship of love where two people are choosing to serve as awakeners and reminders of the power of love for each other and a dysfunctional bond where two people try to isolate, possess, and control each other.

If indeed love is something that already exists inside of us then perhaps the best way to celebrate Valentine’s Day is to use the light of love that exists inside of you to awaken and lift others to what is the best within them. Love is not out there. It is in here – inside each of us.

Let’s reclaim a higher purpose to Valentine’s Day than trying to seduce one another with gifts and romantic gestures that fuel a $22 billion industry. Consider taking the time to write love letters to the people in your life who serve to remind you of the best that is within you. Who are those people? How do they make you feel inside yourself? How do they inspire you? What are you most grateful for about having them in your life? Tell them. What greater gift could there possibly be?

Did you know that your brain gives preference to visual information?

Researchers L.D. Rosenblum, Harold Stolovitch, and Erica Keeps refer to our senses as learning portals and offer the following statistics regarding the percentage of data processed by each of our five senses:

Sight (both through our eyes and unconscious visual perception) accounts for an estimated 83% of the information we process.  Another 11.0% comes through hearing, 3.5% through smell, 1.5% through touch, and the remaining 1.0% through taste.

Why is this significant? By design, our eyes focus our attention outward. The fact that the vast majority of our sensory data is visual therefore predisposes us to an external frame of reference that focuses on the physical world.

Unaware that we are “seeing” the projection of an internally-filtered reality, we misinterpret our perceptions of reality to be reality itself. Consider the heated arguments between individuals of opposing political points of view. Each sees a different reality and believes that they are “right” and those on the other side of the aisle are “wrong.”

Until we become aware of how our internal data processing determines the reality we perceive, we think we are reacting to an external reality, rather than determining what that reality appears to be.

For most of us, our socialization includes indoctrination into a binary model of consciousness. In other words, we are taught to sort people and experiences into right/wrong, good/bad, beautiful/ugly, desirable/undesirable and so on. In fact, life is far more complex and messy than that. Learned biases and preferences short-circuit the process of developing curiosity about those differences that we are taught to reject. There is a built-in bias against diversity in this way of encountering unfamiliar people and experiences. Therefore, diversity requires a new way of perceiving beyond our autopilot right/wrong sorting process. In a binary approach, there are only two choices. That means if we encounter someone who is different, we can’t both be “right” or “OK.” As a result, we develop very narrow tolerances for differences, rather than nurturing our curiosity and openness to all kinds of people and experiences.

The best way to tame your inclination to judge anyone who is different than you or any experience you don’t like is to become really curious and to call upon your inner detective. When we are quick to judge, we shut ourselves down. We also close ourselves off from additional information available to us. And, our myopic view blinds us from alternative ways of seeing ourselves, the other person, and the situation itself.

When we become curious, we open ourselves up and draw ourselves closer to those we don’t understand rather than shutting them out or pushing them away.

 By about the age of five or six, we have the foundation of our self-image in place and we begin to unconsciously protect, conceal, or improve our image of ourselves and to become competitive with the self-images of others. We spend most of our time focused outwards through our self-image as we negotiate and navigate our way through the world and relate to the imagined self-images being projected by others.

We learn to live in a world that is a collective figment of our imaginations in which we attempt to defend and elevate our    status relative to that of others.

We selectively see things that support our existing beliefs and filter out things that do not agree with our way of seeing things.

Yet another paradox of our visual orientation is that it makes it very difficult for us to verify and trust the existence of non-physical reality. This is the territory of self-knowledge, intuition, and spiritual awareness.

It is interesting to note that when physical things come into being we refer to them as being born, yet when we refer to spiritual awareness, we call it awakening – i.e. becoming aware of something that already exists. In physical form, we exist as separate beings. Spiritually, we exist within oneness. It is our mind and emotions that have separated us.

Paying attention to non-physical reality is a bit like being a salmon swimming upstream against the current. It requires an intentional redirection of our focus. To turn inward, to engage in a more intimate relationship with ourselves, and to awaken ourselves spiritually require a different state of mind. A future blog entitled Being of Two Minds will explore this matter in greater detail. 

The external orientation of our attention, coupled with the bombardment of 11 million new pieces of unconscious sensory data per second, makes it extremely difficult to awaken our spiritual awareness, to know ourselves intimately, or to comprehend that while we are perceptually different, we are at once one and the same. We are both singular and separate.

Learning how to become more conscious of our own unique data sorting process is essential to mastering the art of being who we authentically are.

Spiritual awakening involves consciously and intentionally developing our ability to override our usual way of being and perceiving. It requires looking within rather than being drawn to an external focus by the dominance of visual sensory input we are receiving. It means cultivating a non-judgmental perspective towards differences and an awareness of a level upon which we are all the same. This requires cultivation of a childlike curiosity rather than a defensive and competitive stance regarding our perceptions versus those of others. It requires an entirely different kind of awareness – not based on sensory data, but rather the attunement to something greater than our physical form that is shared by all. Language and empirical science fail us in speaking clearly about such matters, but do not negate their existence.

Ludwig Wittgenstein concluded in his monumental book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” This German, philosophical heavyweight is reputed to have put down is pen and become a gardener after writing that.

Each of us has our own unique life to lead.  As we learn about the power of the Reticular Activating System (RAS) it becomes clear that the quality of our consciousness determines how we experience our lives.

Ghandi said, ‘My life is my message.”  What does your life say about you? How skilled are you at being an active co-creator of your life?