Emotional Overload

If you open a social media app, your feed might look as follows: something very funny, something very sad, something about politics, something enraging, some niche controversial opinion, etc. Each of these elicits a wildly different emotion. Yet you experience all of these emotions within seconds.

I have noticed this exposure handicaps my ability to process real emotions. When I experience something sad in my life, there is no subsequent happy or funny moment I can swipe down to. The emotion of sadness persists indefinitely, but my brain is trained to try and discard this emotion within moments. The most dangerous part to me is: the strongest coping mechanism is to continue engaging with social media to once again flood one’s brain with too many emotions to process at once, until they all mix into a blurred, intangible mess.