Is Social Media Bad For Your Health?

When I reflect on what will define my generation, stripping away nuance and distilling us to the inevitable two-word short-hand (and especially if I'm already feeling slightly maudlin) I can't help but think of us as underachievers.

We were not, thank god, the great generation that fought tyranny and wrestled Europe from the hands of madmen. Nor were we the counter cultural dreamers of the 60's believing (however incorrectly) we were on the cusp of a new age of understanding. What will come to define us in the privileged western world is the changes brought about by the Internet, and in particular by people like Mark Zuckerberg, Serge Brin and Larry Page.

This is not an "everything new is terrible" type rant. The polarisation of debate, whereby every issue is represented by two entrenched camps who disagree on every point and see things in rigidly dogmatic terms, is itself a product of the media that currently defines our lives. One thing that seems universally true is things are rarely black and white and the truth is often somewhere in the middle. To wade in and say social networking is ruining human communication would be a facile echo of every reactionary down through history who thought the printing press was the work of Satan or taping songs from the radio would bring down the music industry.

Plus it would be hypocritical. I enjoy Facebook and twitter when I don't use them too much and I am grateful to live in a world where information has never been so accessible. I love the internet - But that doesn't mean we don't have problems.

We should have seen this coming. If there's one thing we excel at its seeking efficiency - the easy path. Take food for example. We need calories, and throughout history societies have been shaped by that drive to obtain and consume them. As we developed technologically we became more efficient at hunting and preparing food, and for a time maybe we even found a balance where the energy expended was matched by the calorific reward. The hunt and the farming earned the deer and the grain. This is the utopian concept of Arcadia, of living in balance with nature.

But we didn't stop there, we progressed to the point where highly calorific food can be obtained with no effort. But our bodies don't know it, we're still hard wired to consume, to eat now in case we don't get the chance again. We've built a delivery system that provides more than our bodies can process without developing the internal systems, the psychology, to deal with and regulate this unlimited availability.

So, inevitably, we got fat.

Now, with the bottom layers of Maslow's famous pyramid solidly in place (food, shelter) we've collectively moved onto the next level- friendship, recognition, achievement. And when I'm at my most pessimistic I feel that with the Internet we've built a delivery system just as efficient (and therefore potentially destructive) at satisfying those needs for friendship and recognition as the food system is at satisfying our more basic appetites. We've invented the relationship equivalent of empty calories.

I can't pretend to be immune to this, my girlfriend will tell you if she leaves the dinner table in a restaurant for a second my hand goes straight to my pocket to check email and Facebook, it's an unconscious reaction at this point. Those little red circled alerts in the top left hand corner of your page are perfectly engineered to prompt reward-seeking behaviour, the expectation of reward triggering a highly addictive hormonal cascade . Make no mistake , you are Pavlov's dog with an iPhone. Of course most friendships on Facebook aren't real friendships and no "like" or flattering comment can compare to recognition by someone you truly care about, but it's a cheap and abundant form of interaction.

Another brutally efficient delivery system is internet pornography (a word I've just noticed my prudish iPhone refuses to autocorrect). Porn delivers a quick dopamine hit, that rush of happiness we feel when we achieve something, it's association with sex having an obvious evolutionary benefit. But just as too much sugar reduces our insulin sensitivity, too much porn reduces our dopamine sensitivity . Like laboratory monkeys we keep hitting the feed button but eventually we require bigger hits to reach the same high.

Junk food, junk friendship, junk sex.

The pattern is the same; take something we're hard wired to crave and Darwinianly disinclined to limit our consumption of, something that was once a self-limiting commodity requiring work to obtain , then refine it, strip it of its most enriching components and make it freely and infinitely available.

Take the brakes off our primal desires and we run into problems.

But let's not freak out just yet. If we're smart enough to invent the Internet surely we can become smart enough to use it responsibly.

The junk food parallel is instructive. Just as there's no problem with having unhealthy foods in moderation, so it is with social media and the Internet . I don't want to be alarmist and pretend this is the biggest cultural problem we're facing and of course there a benefits.

One criticism that tends to be levelled at things like Facebook is that the friendships are meaningless,

"If they're really your friends just call them up or email them or see them in person."

But I disagree, I see my real friends in person all the time, regardless of Facebook. What social media is good for is maintaining soft contacts with people who, at any other point in history, you would have lost touch with. It shouldn't be seen as a replacement for true friendship and it never will be. It is a new medium and in many ways a fascinating one, for the first time we are communicating in real time via text and the methods we've developed to quickly convey emotions are interesting to watch as they emerge and evolve.

Simply by being aware that problems can arise, you can start to recognise them if they do. A friend of mine recently came off Facebook because it was stressing him out and making him less productive. I noticed something similar a few years ago and instigated a "cull" which I still ruthlessly enact when I see idiotic "sweat is fat crying" type slogans or constant promotion of a product or service.

But just as with nutrition, relying on willpower alone is less effective than building habits that naturally limit your usage.

Turn your phone off or go for walks without it regularly.

Use apps like AntiSocial to disable social networks when you're working on something and need to eliminate distractions.

As ever, make time to see and speak to your friends for real. Life has always thrown up distractions that can get in the way of our fundamental need to socialise. Social media is no different, we still need to make an effort.

Now please share and tweet this blog.

Drop And Give Me Zen Part 2 - The Sensory Deprivation Tank

When you first take a stroll in the bullshit-strewn field of spiritual enlightenment, you’ll find before you a smorgasbord of options, from the truly out-there to the relatively mundane. I decided to start simple and work my way to the weirder end of the spectrum. My gateway drug was the flotation tank.

You probably have a vague notion of these things: Lie in a tank, suspended in salt-water in total silence and total darkness. With no sensory input, unloaded by gravity and drifting in blackness you can supposedly put the meditative process on steroids. Instant zen. Floatworks near London Bridge is the premiere venue so I booked a course and was on my way.

The tank originated in the fifties, a golden age of psychological and behavioral research. Timothy Leary and his cohorts at Harvard were bringing a scientific legitimacy to the field of psychedelics, and John C Lilly was busy loading students up on LSD and locking them in the tank for up to ten hours at a time. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Altered States” with William Hurt you get the idea. Hurt plays a Lilly-esque professor exploring the outer psychic reaches through the LSD/tank combo. The upshot? He devolves into a prehistoric ape-man and slashes a hole in the fabric of reality (a sequence which inspired the music video for Take On Me by Aha, fact fans.) I’ve never experimented with psychedelics in my life and on a list of places to try them a silent, black, watery coffin is not even in my top ten. So I chose to forego the LSD and combine simple meditation with sensory deprivation.

At Floatworks, before I get anywhere near the tank, the mood is set. A book of artwork inspired by sensory deprivation lies on a coffee table. The imagery is typical new age stuff - sleeping bodies drifting in tranquility through Sergeant Pepper landscapes. I’m handed a booklet that quickly answers any questions I have about the session - How do you know when the session is over? (Relaxing music plays for the last five minutes) How do you get out of the tank? (You push it open.) An aquarium bubbles away serenely in the background. All in all, everything that can possibly be done to assuage my anxieties and enhance the experience is done.

I meet Peter, the manager, who astutely notes the contradictory position I’m in: Writing an article about altered states, constructing a narrative even as I’m having the experience, is not exactly conducive to the kind of “in-the-moment” mindfulness required to actually have it. He tells me to just focus on my breathing, have no expectations, and relax.  

The tank itself is beautiful - far from the welded, clanking death box of the William Hurt movie, more like the stasis pods from the film Alien if Steve Jobs had designed them. It’s bigger than I’d imagined with plenty of room to drift without bonking the sides, which would tend to harsh your mellow. I have a quick shower, pop in some ear-plugs, climb in and close the lid.

It’s dark, obviously, and silent except for my own blood pumping around my head. The water temperature is so perfectly matched to my own body that the divide between air and water is barely perceptible. I lie back and float, and wait.

Many people are put off by meditation because they have a mistaken impression of the goal, which is not the absence of thought. A truly blank mind is unattainable for all but the most devout BNP member, and trying to achieve it is as futile as trying really hard not to think about a polar bear. The more you try the more you think of the polar bear.

We go in and out of meditative states throughout the day without noticing. If you just detach from what’s around you, allow thoughts to come and go rather than holding onto them, and then redirect your attention to something simple like your breathing, you are meditating. And the benefits are myriad and profound. People who meditate regularly have larger and thicker grey matter in the areas that deal with attention and processing sensory input; your brain literally grows, just like a muscle in response to exercise. When we consider that these areas of the brain usually degrade and thin as we grow older, this amounts to anti-aging.

Time in the tank moves differently. Without a frame of reference I quickly lose the ability to estimate how long I’ve been floating. The physical barrier of the walls helps with detaching from the world outside and I find it easy to forget about emails and obligations.

Over the next hour I lapse into long moments of non-thought, a sort of mental passivity, until my conscious mind notices and butts in with “hey look! I’m thinking about nothing” - at which point the spell is broken and I am of course thinking again. This happens repeatedly but in sum I am, if not quite transported to bodiless blissful oblivion, enormously relaxed.

But the most profound effects occur after I leave the tank.

Until I say it, it’s unlikely you’re currently aware that your shoes are full of feet. In other words, we tune out the constant sensory awareness that we have a body with weight and mass and skin rubbing against clothes. When I get out of the tank I feel, for the first time in my life, the physical weight of the biological machine I live in. It’s so striking I need to sit down for about twenty minutes, pupils dilated, gulping water and testing the weight of my arms. (Floatworks has an entire post-tank “chill out” area for this so it’s clearly a common effect.) Even hours after I’ve left, a shopkeeper appears to be speaking in fast-forward. That night’s sleep is like returning to the womb and I awake calm and refreshed.

Try the tank; you’ll like it, and I’ll definitely be booking more sessions. It probably helps if you’ve done some meditation in the past, but I think anyone will benefit from just slowing down for an hour and doing something solely for their own mental wellbeing.

That said, it’s not quite the shortcut to higher consciousness I’m looking for. I know I need to try different, maybe more extreme methods. I’ve got some travel coming up where I’ll take this experiment further. Also, chatting to Peter prior to my session he’d reminded me of something called the God Helmet.

It should be an interesting summer.

Inconvenient Fitness Truths

Remember those episodes of sitcoms where they took a load of clips from previous episodes, filmed a few minutes of new material as a framing device and then broadcast it as a filler show? That’s kind of what this is. A few ideas that might have become blog posts but never made it. I’m not exactly selling it to you, I know, but hopefully there’s something here for everyone to disagree with.

1 - At a certain point, how good you look is directly correlated with how boring a life you're willing to lead.

2 - Not everyone needs to drink in order to have a good time. A non-drinker will always be the first to inform you of this. However, often they will somewhat undermine their point by proceeding to be the most boring person in the room.

3 -Getting into truly remarkable shape requires an obsession with every morsel you put in your mouth on a par with, if not equal to, an eating disorder.

That's not necessarily always a bad thing. When done for a specific period of time and with a level of emotional detachment it can be a powerful and transformative learning experience. But when it becomes a chronic state, creates constant stress and prevents us from having a life outside of the relentless pursuit of a physical ideal, the eating disorder tag becomes more appropriate.

4 -Due to the constant need for new content and marketing, there's a massive emphasis on originality in the fitness industry. This is misplaced. People have been getting in great shape for years, the chance of a trainer actually coming up with a "revolutionary" system or exercise is pretty minimal.

5 - More money is made within the fitness industry from selling courses to trainers than from training the end user. To maintain demand, there is a lot of pressure on trainers to gain ever more technical knowledge, or at least attend more courses. This can become a pissing contest.

In reality, beyond a certain point, a trainer's technical knowledge has zero correlation with how successful they are. That doesn’t mean technical knowledge is a bad thing of course, and many trainers are happy to keep learning purely because they love the subject. But with the average client, this high level technical training knowledge is the equivalent of using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.

The value that successful trainers provide isn’t their “super secret ab formula.”  It’s in how they communicate and empathise with their clients. They realise that the service is about the client’s values, not the trainer’s ego.

6 - Despite looking the part, people who have always naturally been in great shape often don't make great trainers. Having said that, a trainer who looks like they don't train at all is unlikely to inspire confidence.

7 - Occasionally a client comes along who is prepared and motivated to do anything you tell them. If you say "run through that wall", they'll say "how many sets?" These clients are a gift. You will get amazing results with them. But so would anybody. One way to get incredible results as a trainer is to consistently target and only ever train these clients. The catch is you won't be particularly busy and you will never stretch your coaching abilities.

Drop And Give Me Zen - (How To Cheat Your Way To Enlightenment Part 1)

Meditation. Religious rituals. Chanting. Fasting. Psychedelic drugs. Tantric sex. Alas, not my holiday itinerary. This is a list of practices with a common goal - the creation of altered states of consciousness.

The delivery of "Enlightenment.”

I'm an uber-rationalist. I believe in reality you can stub your toe on and the merest whiff of new age is enough to send me into a grand mal seizure of eye rolling.

But a scorn for new age bullshit doesn't preclude me from being fascinated with altered states. And there's only so much philosophising and pontificating you can do, eventually you've got to put your money where your aura is.

It’s like travel in a way. People say you should visit Las Vegas, or India, or the pyramids at least once in your life. Well, I feel the same about catching a glimpse of the infinite cosmic consciousness. Given the micro economy of methods promising to deliver psychic tranquility - sweat lodges, meditation retreats, flotation tanks and so on, and given the fact that the real goal of so many religious and cultural rituals is the inducement of that elusive state, I had to admit there was probably something to it.

Two Things Fascinate Me…

Thing 1- There's a part of your mind that's much smarter, funnier and more creative than you are. Most of the time the best you can do is glimpse it. The limbo moments before sleep where a brilliant solution pops into your head unbidden and fully formed. The precarious, golden half-hour when you've had just the right amount of booze to lubricate your thoughts and lower your inhibitions but not so much that you're drunk, and in that languid state you are at your wittiest, your most confident and urbane. Who is that guy and why can't you be him more often? We always contain the potential to be our best self, but our brain’s hardware tends to reign it in. For example - all moments of creative insight are preceded by a suppression of frontal lobe activity. That's why a solution often occurs when you're washing the dishes or going for a walk instead of actively thinking on it; the repetitive and simple task down-regulates frontal lobe activity and allows creative alchemy to occur. That frontal lobe is the gatekeeper of creativity, it keeps your genius self in check.

Could access to higher conscious states grant me power over that oppressive cortex and let me be that guy more often?

Thing 2- Not only is this state the common goal of everything from meditation and religious rituals to LSD use, there's a remarkable uniformity to the experience people describe when they achieve it. Without fail there's talk of a connection to the universe, of "oneness."

Ok, so far so boringly new age. And honestly the language of spirituality leaves me cold, relying as it does on a supernatural higher power in which I have precisely zero belief. But when smart, rational people take psychedelic drugs they without fail report the same sensation almost word for word. Why is that? Evidence of a shared dimension of human experience or just a weird cognitive illusion? just the psychological equivalent of those magic-eye 3D pictures, taking advantage of our brain chemistry to cool effect but ultimately banal and explainable ?

I want to find out.

In part two I’ll I try to remove my mind from my body through sensory deprivation.

A Guide To Half Finishing Books

It's no big deal really, there are worse intellectual crimes. Creationism for example, or liking dubstep. And yet every time we abandon a book halfway through it feels a little bit like a defeat.

It sits by the bed. Face down, spine broken, bulging slightly where you've folded a page as a bookmark. A page that will now (despite your half-hearted avowal to return to it) forever trumpet the moment of your abdication.

"Too tough for you was I? Never mind. I hear Dan Brown's got a new one in the works."

I'm a promiscuous reader; three or four books on the go at once, each assigned a rough apportionment based on its location in the flat, time of day or other factors. Even travel concerns affect the rota; bulky hardcover or ephemeral iphone download?

But, crucially, the system works. So when it breaks down and I find myself skipping over a book in my daily rounds, putting it off till tomorrow or (worse) forcing myself through a preordained number of pages simply to feel like I'm making headway, I get a little anxious.

It's not that I don't like reading. If anything it's that I love it too much. I just find it hard to commit. I see lists of "100 books to read before you die" as an objective scoring system, a method of quantifying just how uncultured I am.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would say it's due to my lack of a traditional academic background . A university degree in a respected subject engenders security in one's own intellect. In contrast, to be self-taught, working in an industry without the agreed hierarchy of a traditional profession, one is more likely (says Bourdieau) to become an "anxious intellectual hoarder." Like an over-eater whose mind is on the next forkful instead of what's in their mouth, I catch myself worrying about the knowledge I'm missing out on even as I'm reading something I find fascinating.

Not all books provoke conclusion anxiety of course. short story anthologies or collected essays welcome the sporadic reader. A Clive James collection will be content to lie around till whenever we feel like dipping in. In contrast, a half-read War and Peace with its mercilessly vast and bafflingly polyonymous cast is some seriously guilt-inducing book shelf real estate. It will stand there, quietly judging until you come crawling back.

You could argue life's too short to persevere with any book that doesn't instantly grab you and compel you to keep reading. But almost by definition serious literature is the stuff that rewards effort, to shy away from any book that doesn't yield immediate superficial pleasure is to confine yourself to mass market page-turners.

My solution then, for the commitment shy bibliophile is to embrace both your literary sluttishness and a book-rotation system. Following multiple stories in weekly instalments is standard practice for comic book fans. It's also how we watch TV, barring the occasional single show box-set binge, so why be a monogamist in one medium when you already philander in others?

As for when to abandon books, of course it's a personal choice, but I suggest a 100 page rule. If you're that far in and not hooked, no matter how great the book is supposed to be, I say ditch it, guilt-free, and move on.

Kafka apparently reckoned that after a certain point books could finish anywhere, and even left some of his