We are constantly informed of new threats around us. This cycle keeps us sensitized and distractible. 

This doesn’t just happen online either, and this cycle’s prevalence is emergent of competing attempts at manipulating it. 

In the case of Facebook and even just simple images, emotions can be triggered, even unconsciously. Neuroscience research by Alexander J Shackman and Andrew S. Fox presents experiments where amygdala activation was sustained in anticipation of seeing aversive images. 

This means the amygdala, or the fear center of the brain that inhibits our rational thinking, is activated by just the anticipation of something aversive. 

You may realize this presents an interesting problem: We have the chance of seeing something aversive every time we open our phones. 

Sara Jo Nixon, professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Florida College of Medicine, told National Geographic that repeated exposure to threats, which we are naturally made to be aware of, can keep our fight or flight systems switched on, which means our critical thinking is switched off. Nixon also said that this can increase our feelings of fatigue, hopelessness and anxiety. 

The National Geographic article also discusses how indirect exposure to traumatic events like 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing and even the COVID-19 pandemic, can trigger PTSD symptoms.

Thanks to the repeated exposure of these types of events, we are kept in a cycle of coping and ruminating, never getting to process or understand. In other words, resolutions don’t trend as problems do. 

Now imagine that this cycle was constantly perpetuated to you, every time you tried to access the most revolutionary social technology in the world. Maybe you don’t have to imagine this. 

According to Dr. Richard F. Mollica and Thomas Hübl in a Harvard Health Publishing article, symptoms of collective trauma are widespread. They include feeling overwhelmed, anxious or fatigued. The authors said that keeping our brains in modes of threat-awareness can be like extra programs in the background of your computer that slow it down.

Thanks to the speed and overflow of threatening events happening, we don’t have the time to process them, giving us sleep-debt-like states of overwhelm. It doesn’t help that we might not even see the resolution. 

In a review article, Jeffery Rosen et al. explained that this repeated exposure doesn’t numb us, it sensitizes us. Not only do we stay fearful, but our perception of “relevant” threats is raised, and “irrelevant” ones lowered. This means we are more reactive and attentive, not consciously responding or thinking. 

How can this be used against us? Well, political science researchers Pablo Barberá et al. found that world leaders seem to shift their social media posts from domestic to foreign policy in times of domestic crisis, making foreign problems seem more relevant than domestic ones. Economics researchers Ruben Durante and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya found that “Israeli attacks are more likely to occur when U.S. news on the following day are dominated by important predictable events,” like a big speech. 

So not only are we quite distractible, but it even seems to be planned for. 

It isn’t just world leaders, but their coverage too. Jari Kätsyri et al. found that negative tweets were more and longer distracting from background news compared to positive ones–drperfectly showing the competition for our attention. 

I’m not here to scare you, though. There is good news. Arne Öhman’s research suggests that, when shown objective threats that we aren’t particularly afraid of, if we can consciously process the stimulus, our fear response is inhibited. But his research also shows the amygdala functions as an automatic detector of threat, requiring regular consciousness of this cycle. 

Next time you feel yourself responding to something triggering, or feel drawn by this cycle, pause and remember how much money is being spent to try to get you there. The trigger may be absurd, irrelevant or just plain unfounded. 

These triggers have plenty of conscious and unconscious effects on us, but by processing them, we can free ourselves from the self-fulfilling cycles of fear.