My Digital Stress

I’ve always been fortunate enough to fall asleep rather quickly (and now I’ve jinxed it). Even in the most stressful periods of my life, professionally or personally, sleep comes easily for me.

Over the last nine months, aligning perfectly with a pandemic, I have noticed two strange periods in my sleep that make me realize the struggles that many adolescents and “tweens” are dealing with at the end of their days.

This summer, I’d go to bed upset at a team of digital men because one of them fumbled the ball at the goal line in the fourth quarter and lost the game for his little digital teammates (and me, he lost the game for me, mostly). If I play video games, I’m usually firing up the console before bed, squeezing in a game of Madden on a screen that’s emitting enough blue light to keep a small village awake. After a disappointing loss, which comes more often than I’d like to admit, I’d brush my teeth and climb into bed with offensive game plans, third down schemes, and potential trades riffling through my mind. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and my concerns hadn’t waned. I don’t remember my dreams, but I could tell that the thing that woke me up at 3:30am was Madden football related.

More recently, I decided to go against everything I’ve seen in “Social Dilemma” on Netflix and try to post more regularly on Instagram (once a day). This is in an attempt to build some sort of audience and carve out a teeny-tiny space of my own on the app. Like with Madden in the summer, I’m waking up in the middle of the night with grids, ideas, and stress firing in my mind. I’m also feeling competitive, checking stats and my “reach”, comparing my account to others, tracking my added (and lost) followers. I check in on other accounts, too, curious about their activity and follower count.

This might be my version “Super Size Me.” Adult man spends one month trying to post every day on instagram. I could take a stress test at the start of the month and another one at the end of the month (I could just buy a Whoop?).

When these littles waves of anxiety come around, I always think about the kids I used to teach who would come into school clearly distracted by all the background noise the digital world has created for them, stresses swirling through them out of fear of missing out on something or feeling like some sort of streak needs to be maintained. My Madden and IG anxiety is not tied to my social or personal life at all, either. The stakes are higher for kids, their social life is on the Internet. Something can happen online and follow them into the classroom the next day, and it can stick for days or even weeks. For me, the stakes are low.

When I was in 8th grade, my friend Phil and I were lab partners and Madden friends (he’s one of the guys in my Madden league currently, too). We’d spend every science class debating who we were going to take in our weekend Madden fantasy draft (note: neither got into the a science field when we grew up….). This wasn’t online, this was just the two of us, teenagers on a couch, playing QB and running back for the same team, drinking soda and eating ham sandwiches. When we weren’t playing, the world only existed in our minds. There was no one in some far flung place in the world playing Madden online and improving while we figured out the caloric output of donuts and other foods in the lab. In our small, simple, 8th grade minds, we were the only people in the world playing Madden.

It’s different now, and these two little spells of anxiety have made me realize how incredibly challenging it is for kids to pull themselves away physically and emotional from their devices. The gravitational force is staggering, even as a stable 37 year-old, it can feel overwhelming and a little scary. My mind, even in rest mode is spinning through my digital day at 3:30am.

The scariest part is if I keep posting every day on IG (which isn’t even that intensive when it’s planned out a little bit), I know my mind will normalize that behavior and I’ll start to wonder if I should maybe, just maybe, sprinkle in an extra post here and there, you know, for the algorithm. It’s like ordering the large fries or that one last beer or sneaking out for just one last cigarette.

Moderation has always seemed a requirement, as the Finnish say, “Happiness is a place between too little and too much.”