Weekly ideas about living a good, meaningful and high performing life in a chaotic world from Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. Best selling authors of PEAK PERFORMANCE, DO HARD THINGS, and THE PRACTICE OF GROUNDEDNESS.
Share
When Everything Is a Crisis, Nothing Is: The Numbing Effect of the Infinite Scroll
Published 4 days ago • 7 min read
When Everything Is a Crisis, Nothing Is: The Numbing Effect of the Infinite Scroll
To read or comment on the GrowthEQ site, click here
Scroll social media, and you’ll see someone being murdered, a cat video, deep political analysis, someone performing the latest TikTok dance, and live footage of a war—all in 60 seconds or less. This sort of out-of-context information overload has become completely normal, something about which most of us don't even think twice.
But what is it doing to us?
The human brain didn't evolve to handle a relentless flood of contradictory information, sending so many different signals: fear, love, disgust, laughter, despair, joy… all one microsecond after another. The result is emotional whiplash that is making us desensitized and numb.
Marshall McLuhan predicted this dilemma sixty years ago. Back then, the "feed" was a handful of curated television channels. But he saw where we were headed. He warned that electronic media “extends our nervous system globally.”
Before the advent of radio and television, we were largely local creatures. When we saw or heard about a potential threat, the brain responded as if it were on our doorstep—because it usually was. Positive emotions such as joy or laughter were also right in front of us, a signal to bond with a human nearby. Information was largely local, and our nervous system was attuned to that.
However, with the rise of technology, we started to feel events happening across the planet in real time. McLuhan referred to these changes as making us part of "a global village." Our nervous system evolved to process information at the local level, and we now have to deal with a media ecosystem that essentially fools us into thinking we are part of a global tribe—where every news reel, even if it is far away, signals a threat that is personal and near.
Our innate orienting response draws all our resources to a potential snake in the grass or a loud noise that may be a loose boulder. We’re instantly drawn to signals that surprise or indicate a threat. Even if it’s only a squirrel in the bushes, evolution has taught us that it’s better to be safe than sorry. Our threat system prioritizes speed over accuracy, and research shows that modern media hijacks it. It’s why “if it bleeds, it leads” works so well. It wins the battle for attention in milliseconds.
On the internet, and particularly on social media, the problem has increased a thousandfold. We literally feel everything, everywhere, all at once.
While so-called "techno-optimists" thought the rise of global information flow would bring a utopia of empathy and awareness, McLuhan and others foresaw that we could just as easily travel a much darker path.
When we feel everything, we end up feeling nothing. When we’re bombarded by information that all feels hyper important, our brain adapts to deal with the noise. Eventually, we shut down, and we numb out. The constant hits of threat, joy, fear, and disgust become meaningless noise. Our ability to connect information to emotion and take action on the local level goes haywire on the global scale.
Here's a simple metaphor: imagine you’re running a marathon, and every 3 seconds you get a different signal. Your brain screams, “I need fuel! No, make that water…You feel great, speed up! Wait, you feel horrible, drop out… You’re going to bonk…You’re in flow…You’re in imminent danger. Stop!” Eventually, you’d either be driven nuts or somehow tune out everything because there are too many contrasting messages coming in.
It’s emotional context switching on steroids, and it’s precisely what we experience when we’re scrolling social media. It’s threat-panic-opportunity-connection all being signaled one after another. It creates a kind of emotional incoherence, where we can’t connect the information coming in to what we’re feeling or experiencing. If our emotional dial keeps changing, it’s no wonder our brain eventually throws in the towel and disconnects, leading to states of exhaustion and numbness.
McLuhan called this narcosis, from the ancient Greek root meaning numbness. The brain has to numb itself to survive the informational onslaught. But the cost of that is becoming emotionally frozen, or what McLuhan calledpsychic rigor mortis:
“
Were we to accept fully and directly every shock to our various structures of awareness, we would soon be nervous wrecks, doing double-takes and pressing panic buttons every minute. The 'censor' protects our central system of values, as it does our physical nervous system, by simply cooling off the onset of experience a great deal. For many people, this cooling system brings on a lifelong state of psychic rigor mortis."
Remember that McLuhan was discussing the 1960s and 70s!! The emotional whiplash he predicted has reached another level today. We've gone from the global village to the global asylum. Modern science backs this up.
The more time we spend watching violent videos, the less emotionally responsive we become, and crucially, the less sympathy we show for victims of violence. We see it in our physiology too: various studies have found that everything from our blood pressure to our heart rate to our skin conductance, and even the threat areas in our brain, habituates to seeing violence.
Social media exploits our inbuilt system by overwhelming it with scale. Our brain is left with a suboptimal solution of throwing its hands up and saying, what’s the point? Our feelings can’t scale with this. We go numb: emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
We often speak of the costs of social media in terms of distraction, all the hours we waste that could otherwise be productive. But it goes much further than that. It’s slowly eroding our ability to feel. To be moved by tragedy. To experience the joys of life. To keep our moral compass calibrated by our principles and values instead of being taken over by the algorithm. The age of anxiety is also the age of apathy.
What To Do About It?
We’ve written extensively about how to handle your phone on an individual level and the need for greater regulation, especially among kids. But when it comes to the problem of digital numbing, here are three ideas that can help.
1. Reconnect Feeling and Action
Do real things in the real world with real people that are occasionally hard, embarrassing, or frustrating. Experience emotions and feelings as they were meant to be felt—directly in front of you! Laugh, feel fatigue, experience connection, joy, and everything in between. Sports, arts, crafts, and other performance-based activities are great for this. You can’t fake it out on the track or up on stage; you’ve got to feel everything, discern where it’s coming from, and then regulate and deal with it.
The same holds for doing challenging or novel activities. Researchers found that taking on challenges creates psychological richness. Solving a puzzle with your spouse, an escape room with your friends, exploring somewhere new with others: all of these add depth and curiosity to our lives. They put us in a space where we’re wrestling with reality.
2. Turn Anxiety into Productive Action
Instead of scrolling and worrying about whatever controversy or tragedy is happening far away, go local. Run for your local school board, volunteer for the local food bank, coach youth sports, mentor kids at the elementary school. Take that anxiety or worry and turn it into productive action. You don’t have to change the world, but making an actual difference can help you reconnect feeling and action.
To be clear, we aren't suggesting that you bury your head in the sand about current events. But we are suggesting you get honest with yourself about when you are consuming news to stay informed versus when you are consuming news for entertainment or because your nervous system has become addicted to anxiety.
3. Balance out Superficial with Depth
We need a palate cleanser for the online world. Sometimes this simply means “touching grass,” where you go outside, spend time away from your device, or take a digital Sabbath. Consider it a reset for your brain, where instead of getting caught up in the always-frantic world of your phone, you slow down and engage with the physical world.
Other times, this could mean getting lost in something that requires slower engagement—reading a good book, building something, or working on a craft. It doesn’t matter too much what it is, so long as it reminds your brain what it’s like to be deeply absorbed in an activity that demands your attention and that unfolds not in cyber time but in real time.
These are small but important steps. As our world slips further and further into the global asylum—where we’ll have to deal with not only tragedies and cat videos at the same time, but deciding whether it's a real tragedy or an AI one—being proactive to protect your brain from defaulting toward numbness is increasingly paramount.
-- Steve and Brad
One of the best and most satisfying feelings: aspiring toward excellence
A big part of what makes the pursuit of excellence so great is that nobody can buy, power, bribe, authority, or scroll their way into it. Excellence must be earned.
The result is a sense of accomplishment, aliveness, and lasting fulfillment that you don't find anywhere else.
If this makes you tick, then our new book, The Way of Excellence, is for you.
It's a desperately needed counter to digital numbness, and also to the brain-dead, hustle-culture version of "pseudo" excellence. The Way of Excellence is for those who are serious about the real thing, who want to strive toward their potential and not merely exist in the world but be truly alive, explore their limits, and grow. This book is rich and relentlessly pragmatic: each chapter details a crucial habit, mindset, or practice that will bring about more excellence in your own life.
The book drops in under two weeks!But if youorder today, you receive a FREE bonus book on core values, an interactive workbook, a masterclass on mental performance, and more.
Listen🎧: "Why Your Routine Might Be Working Against You" (SPOTIFY/APPLE/YOUTUBE)
A routine is about function, not form: How effective it is simply comes down to whether or not it gets you in the state you need to be to do what you need to do.
Which is why the best routine is a flexible one. The minute some disruption in your day causes you to start stressing about whether or not you can follow your exact routine, you’ve started prioritizing form over function.
A routine should enhance your capacity to do what you need to do, not enhance your desire for control.
We dedicated today’s entire episode of “excellence, actually” to routines, so if you want more useful insights like this, be sure to check out “Why Your Routine Might Be Working Against You” wherever you get your podcasts.
— Clay
Thank you for reading this week's edition of The Growth Equation newsletter. We hope you found it valuable.
P.S., if someone forwarded this email to you, you can sign up to get our weekly email here.
For daily insights, ideas, and practices, be sure to follow us online:
Weekly ideas about living a good, meaningful and high performing life in a chaotic world from Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. Best selling authors of PEAK PERFORMANCE, DO HARD THINGS, and THE PRACTICE OF GROUNDEDNESS.
The Way of Excellence comes out in just over 2 weeks! Order today and get exclusive bonuses. Over five years ago, it occurred to Brad that the pursuit of genuine, heartfelt excellence was falling out of favor. In its place was a synthetic, pseudo version: hacks, quick fixes, secrets, and a whole bunch of elaborate kabuki masquerading as the real thing. The entire mission of this book is to reclaim excellence and show you how to have more of it in your own life. It includes fascinating new...
Reflect: Consistency over Intensity Two characteristics we've noticed in many high performers: Consistency is emphasized more than short-term Intensity: They stack good work week after week, month after month. Instead of trying to be heroes They know how to flip the switch to compete. Instead of always being hypercompetitive, they can turn it on and off. They aren't bringing the same intensity for their race on Saturday to their 7-year-olds' youth soccer game. Stay Even, Keep Moving ”Don’t...
Reflect: Define Who Matters Too often, we let other people into our heads. We play on repeat the comments from the anonymous troll or the offhanded critique of someone on the sidelines. We can't let it go. It becomes that voice in the back of our head that gives credence to the normal doubts we all face.We are wired for warnings. And our brain doesn't do the greatest job of discerning which voices to listen to and which to let go. We often talk about defining what success means to you. We can...