Books That Make You Think - Stolen Focus - Does social media make us angry?

Welcome to our first regular Books That Make You Think slot. In these special segments of the week, we are going to be talking about a book that I've come across that, in my mind, sits on the threshold between psychology, business and marketing. 

One thing that I'm really passionate about is helping psychologists and therapists to learn how to build effective businesses and market ourselves, while feeling like we're still serving our clients really well, and like we're doing some good in the world. And one thing that strikes me is that often when I read books, whether that's a psychology book, or a business book, or a marketing book, I'm kind of merging all of those worlds together in my head, and trying to figure out where I sit as a clinical psychologist with the stuff that I'm learning. 

One book that has really made me think this week is Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, and I talked about it a little bit last week, and people were really interested in some of the learning from it. So I thought that I'd do regular slots, where we can talk about books like Johann Hari's book, which raised some really interesting issues for us, as professionals, and as marketers, as well. So I hope you're gonna find this helpful as people who are in business, but who are also very interested in mental health and promoting good mental health in the world. 

Okay, so the point that I wanted to pick up on this week from Johann Hari's book was the fact that I found quite shocking that on social media, posts that have hate speech in them, words that generate an angry response in us, are the most engaged with and shared posts. So a post that has the words obliterate slam, hate, all of these kind of aggressive words will do much better than a post that is positive. And Johann Hari goes into some of the research behind that and it indicates that this is because it speaks to our negativity bias as humans. And it makes sense, right? We're kind of trained to look out for aggression and violence and pay lots of attention to it as a survival mechanism. It certainly fits with my understanding of how human psychology works. So I don't know why I was that surprised, but I guess I'd never really thought about it before, and it strikes me that there are some clinical implications that need thinking through if this is true on social media, and if the algorithms are going to continue to promote posts like this, that are filled with really hateful language, I think we need to think about that on behalf of our clients and think about how we might need to adapt what we do in the therapy room and in the services that we create for our client groups, in order to take that into consideration. Because it's going to have a major psychological effect on people. Of course it does. So that's the first thing I want to think about today. And the second thing I want to think about is how we take that knowledge and structure our marketing around it. Because there's a bit of a debate here about do we do what works? And we know that what works is all of this negative language and hate speech. Or do we try and do something different, go against the grain of the social media algorithms, and possibly face getting more expensive results or less good results with our social media campaigns? So those are the two things and I'll start with the clinical stuff. Because that's what struck me first when I read this chapter of the book, and I'm really interested to get your thoughts on it. I really want this to be a conversation. So please do let me know what you're thinking as I'm talking about this, especially if you do go on to read the book. I'd be really interested to get some debate going on these topics. 

As a clinical psychologist, I mostly work with parents, and specifically parents who have had to go back to work for one reason or another, whether that's by choice or not by choice. And often it's those parents who have been dealing with mental health difficulties since their children were born, but perhaps didn't notice them until they had to go back to what they considered their normal life before. And for that particular client group, there are so many demands on their attention. And so many demands on them as people, that their threat systems tend to be quite highly activated anyway. So when I was reading that social media has this real bias towards promoting posts which have hate speech in them and posts that make us feel angry, I was thinking, I wonder how much this is contributing to that jangling nervous system that we often see in our clients, and how much that kind of hyper vigilance, anxiety, short temperedness, irritability, all of these things which are so common for parents to talk to me about, how many of those things are being fueled by the posts that they're seeing on social media, because I don't think I have a particularly good sense of that, because my relationship with social media is potentially slightly unusual, in that I mainly use it for work. I actually don't browse very often as a normal user of social media anymore. So I asked my husband about it, and he said he absolutely feels angry and agitated most of the time when he's on Twitter. And when I mentioned it, he was like, oh my gosh, I really recognise that in myself. So, on that sample of one (but there is research to back it up as well which Johann Hari talks about in the book) has made me think that this might be something that I need to integrate into my clinical practice. And perhaps, when we're talking about the benefits of mindfulness, or other things that we might do to help people to decide where they're going to put their attention, maybe we should be bringing up social media and the potential for it to increase our threat systems and to make us feel angry and irritable when we're discussing a plan for somebody maybe taking behavioural steps to improve their mental health. It's just something that I'm thinking about integrating into my work in a more formal way, because although with certain clients, if they've brought it to me, we have worked in that way before, it's not been something I've had in my head that I need to bring to them. And actually, social media is such a big part of what we do now as human beings, as adults in this society, that actually, perhaps I need to be bringing social media up in therapy in the same way that I would bring up sleep or diet. So that's just a thought. And I'd love to know what you think on that topic. 

But now, let's think about potential implications in this for our marketing. Because obviously, a lot of you, you come here for support with your marketing, and not necessarily support with your clinical work. So I'm thinking from a marketing perspective, we've got a real dilemma; do we jump on board with this trend and get lots of views on our posts by being inflammatory? One of the examples that’s used in the book is that posts with high levels of moral outrage do very well. I thought, well, we're all capable of a bit of moral outrage every now and again, and so hypothetically, that could be an option for us; we could hop on board with this and ride the train into the rabbit hole of despair. But as you're probably picking up on from my tone, I am a bit concerned about where that might take people, especially after talking to my husband and asking around with my friends and family about how social media makes them feel. If people actually have an awareness that it creates this anger and irritability within them, I don't feel like that's something I particularly want to be part of, I certainly don't want to make it worse. So I guess where I'm falling down is rebelling and going in the opposite direction with my content and thinking about how I can make my little corner of social media a place that people want to go, where they feel they can come and have a bit of calm while they think through a topic in a bit of detail. It's part of my motivation, actually, for doing some longer videos like this, is yes, the algorithm is telling me not to do this, the algorithm is saying keep it short, keep it snappy, but this isn't something we can talk about in a 30 second sound bite. This is something that needs proper debate and real thinking about and I think, my hypothesis is that there are people out there who are craving that, and that some of our minds are craving that time staying on one subject, rather than this endless, endless scroll of new information all of the time, I think there are people who want to stay with us and think about something deeper for a bit longer. I think it will take longer to get the audience because the algorithms are not going to prioritise longer videos, because they're all about short video at the moment, but I think if you show up and consistently create high quality content, which is giving people good value, and going a bit deeper, being a bit more positive, not giving into this kind of anger inducing language, then people will start sharing that with their friends. It will be slower, but people will do it by almost word of mouth. And you will grow a following of people who come to you for that dose of positivity or thoughtfulness, which they're not getting on the rest of the web. That's my theory anyway, and it feels ethically a lot better with me, to provide that for people, and then hope, and try to promote that content and get people's eyes in front of it. 

So one way that you might do that is creating one longer video or one more positive video per week, and then creating a short snappy summary of that, which might be promoted a bit