How Mindfulness Can Be a Tonic for the Effects of Social Media

By Nick Vetri

While we all use it, social media use has been shown to do damage to our mental health, affect our body images, hurt our attention spans, and make our lives more
untethered.

And because of the way the world is, most of us need to have our smartphones with us at all times, which means we’re always one weak moment away from getting
sucked in.

Fortunately, we don’t have to take all this lying down. There are things we can do, and ways of being we can follow that can heal our frazzled, overloaded brains.

Practicing mindfulness and learning to pay attention can be the corrective we need to thrive in a world where social media always fights for our attention and emotional well-being.

In this article, we will look at things you can do without doing a social media detox to improve your attention span, emotional health, and slow down your pace of life.

Attention Span

“The quality of one’s life depends on the quality of attention. Whatever you pay attention to will grow more important in your life.” – Deepak Chopra

Numerous studies show a correlation between social media use and reduced attention span, especially in young people. A 2025 study has shown a negative correlation between excessive social media use and several cognitive functions, including attention span, working memory, and cognitive control in young adults. A 2023 Swedish study found that regular use of social media hurt high school students’ ability to focus on academic tasks.

This trend is disturbing for several reasons. Paying attention to our surroundings is an important way to be present and have more moments in life.

As stated in our article Lessons from “Be Here Now” by Ram Dass, the only thing we have is the present moment and the true happiness is found within. Therefore, the moments where we are present are the building blocks of a meaningful life.

In mindfulness meditation, you are taught to pay attention to the flow of consciousness without judgment. Through the simple practice of paying attention and bringing your mind back to center when it wanders off, your attention span improves over time.

A 2009 study compared a group of experienced mindfulness meditators to a control group with no meditation experience. It found that the group of meditators performed significantly better in measures of attention and had much higher measures of self-reported mindfulness. This suggests that practicing mindfulness can improve attention spans and make people more present over time.

Mindfulness Practice #1: For a few minutes every day, when you would normally be playing with your phone or listening to music, just put your full attention into what you’re doing or what is happening in your stream of consciousness.

This can be when you’re cutting vegetables, working out, or even just for 10 minutes during your drive to work. Over time, putting in a few minutes each day will accumulate into big changes in your psyche.

Emotional Health

“Social media is training us to compare our lives instead of appreciating everything we are. No wonder everyone is always depressed.” -Bill Murray

Even though we’re all at different levels of emotional health, we are all deeply flawed and fragile human beings. No one would say being a human is easy, and social media has made it harder for us.

Social media, due to unrealistic beauty standards, social comparison to people’s social media highlight reels, and the doom and gloom of internet news, takes a huge toll on our self-image and feeling of safety and security in the world.

According to a systematic review of research published by the US government’s National Library of Medicine, social media and smartphone use in teenagers has been shown to relate to an increase in mental distress, self-harming behaviors, and suicidality.

Another 2014 study found a correlation between Facebook usage and depressive symptoms in both men and women.

While mindfulness can’t change our body images overnight, or put a stop to the way news is reported, it can slowly make us feel safer, more appreciative of our bodies, and a little more joyful.

According to an article by Eating Disorder Hope, an online community for people with eating disorders, mindfulness can improve the negative body image often related to eating disorders. By being mindful of our negative and critical thoughts about our bodies, we can adjust them over time and make peace with our appearance.

Body scan meditation is a kind of mindfulness meditation that can also help us connect to and appreciate our bodies. Body scan meditation involves lying down and scanning our bodies for sensations and thoughts, without judgment.

I’ve found that when I take the time to do body scan meditations, an appreciation and gratitude for my body naturally arise.

Another thing we can do to feel less reactive and more secure is to practice grounding exercises. These exercises help to develop a sense of connectedness with the earth and a deep feeling of security that can help balance the negative effects of social media. Check out this article on grounding techniques for empaths and sensitive individuals (it works for people who aren’t sensitive too!).

Mindfulness Practice #2: Check out this guided body scan meditation from Mindful.org and make it part of your weekly practice. In addition to relieving stress and building non-judgmental awareness, you might find that this meditation helps you change the negative relationship you have with your body image.

Slowing Down

“Dress me slowly, I’m in a hurry.”- Napoleon Bonaparte

Anyone who can remember what things were like before smartphones and social media became so popular knows that the pace of life has gotten a lot faster in the last 15 years. This is hard not only because we’re more stressed out and rushed than ever, but also because we don’t take the time to witness the beauty of what’s going on around us.

Just as there is beauty in the thrashing waves of wind and rain in a hurricane, there is beauty and meaning in a terrible day if we can slow down and be attentive enough.

So, it would seem that we need to learn how to slow down, and if possible, in a way that doesn’t make us less efficient in our everyday lives.

Luckily, there is a way to be both slower and more efficient, and that’s to break the habit of rushing.

When we rush, our mind consumes excess amounts of energy and gets bent out of shape, which actually makes us do things more inefficiently. So, there is evidence to suggest that moving at a slower, more balanced pace gets us to where we want to go faster.

This is the logic behind the US special forces maxim, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” And the quote at the beginning of this section, “Dress me slowly, I’m in a hurry.”

A 2015 study found that many natural and artificial systems actually functioned more slowly as the individual parts strove to increase speed. They found this to be true in pedestrians crossing the street, pedestrian evacuation, traffic, logistics, supply chains, and others. They called this the Slower is Faster effect, and they gave this example:

“How fast should an athlete run a race? If she goes too fast, she will burn out and become tired before finishing. If she runs conservatively, she will not get tired, but will not make her best time. To minimize her race time, she has to go as fast as possible but without burning out. If she goes faster, she will actually race more slowly. This is an example of the “slower-is-faster” (SIF) effect: in order to run faster, sometimes it is necessary to run slower, not to burn out.”

This is related to mindfulness because being mindful of your current state of mind will allow you to know when you’re rushing and when to press the “slow down” button. If you can take the time to put your phone down and pay attention to your everyday state of mind, this will be a lot easier. So, try taking the time to be present, to slow down, and to enjoy the process. You might find your work gets done faster than when you were rushing.

Mindfulness Practice #3: The next time you’re in a rush to get something done, slow down enough so that you’re doing it purposefully, but not rushing.

This could be when you’re walking somewhere, washing dishes, working, or driving.

If you can put your attention into the process and do it quickly, but without the anxiety of rushing, you will find that you get it done faster and better.

If you’re walking, you will get there faster than if you strain your muscles and repeat the thought, “I’m late. I need to hurry up.”

If it’s a task at work, you’ll find that a steady focus actually gets things done faster than a mind that is grimly anxious to finish. This is especially true for tasks that take longer than a half hour.

Conditioning and the Unlearning of Desire

Science and energy healing do occasionally cross paths, and they do so in surprising ways. We can understand craving itself as a conditioned response. The body learns to expect pleasure from a certain cue – say, the smell of coffee or the sound of a lighter flick – and responds accordingly. That same response, once you’ve identified it, can be unlearned.

Meditation can play a central role in this unlearning. When you practice meditation every day, even briefly, it will bring attention to the moments just before an urge rises. That tiny pause between want and action is where real change begins. Techniques such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) can help you build this awareness. And once you combine meditation with subtle energy practices, the effects multiply. You get fewer relapses, calmer mornings, and an overall easier sense of self-control.

The idea isn’t to reject desire altogether. Your aim should be to understand it as a signal gone out of tune. Energy healing provides tools to listen differently, to feel the body’s cues without surrendering to them. Over time, these techniques teach patience with one’s own system. For many people, it’s the purest form of recovery.

My Personal Experience

In my more than 10 years of experience meditating, I’ve found that I have slowly learned how to slow down and pay attention to life more of the time. I’ve become more mindful of what’s going on in my head, and I now have more control over which thoughts I react to and which thoughts I don’t. I am also able to slow down a bit more.

That’s not to say that you need to have an extensive meditation habit to see the effects.

But making a habit of being mindful will slowly change your brain and make it more user-friendly. It’s just a question of forming small habits and intentionally practicing mindfulness.

By being mindful for a few minutes a day, you will be well on your way to improving your attention span, mental health, and slowing down and enjoying life more thoroughly. In this way, we can take back what we’ve lost by living in this crazy, hyper-modern world.