How to wake up motivated.Lying in bed, left cheek on pillow, I’m perfectly positioned to see the tree outside my window. Each morning I admire its leaves dancing in the wind, their varying colours indicative of changing seasons. It’s a pleasant start to my day, a moment of stillness and appreciation before I’m vertical.
Hello… is it me you’re looking for?There’s a universe at your fingertips, brimming with promises of digital delights. How hard it is to resist the lure of bright lights, shiny icons and pleasant pings! Every aspect of this universe is the deliberate result of Silicon Valley exploiting behavioural psychology to hijack our habit-forming tendencies. Knowing how to stop being addicted to your phone seems an impossible task.
Body image issues arise in the mind, not the body.Let’s begin with a simple truth: the mainstream media, particularly the advertising industry, defines beauty standards. These definitions are deliberately unattainable and perfect, because they fit an agenda. Making us feel bad about how we look works in the favour of profit-making corporations. With multiple billions at stake, it’s unlikely we’ll witness diverse, attainable and imperfect definitions of beauty in the mainstream media, at least in our lifetime.
It’s official — Instagram is the worst social media site for mental health. All social media sites have a potentially detrimental effect on the way we feel, but Instagram, with its heavy focus on imagery, has a particularly negative impact on one specific area: body image. Instagram isn’t the instigator of body image issues, of course, but instead a heavily-filtered reflection of a culture that objectifies, sexualises and commodifies the human body, while promoting unattainable and unrealistic standards of what beauty is.
The Guardian has again worked its whistleblowing magic, exposing the role of Cambridge Analytica in illegally obtaining masses of personal data from 50 million Facebook profiles. This data was then used by Trump’s digital political campaign to target the U.S electorate. It’s not good news for Mark Zuckerberg — as Facebook’s stock falls, the momentum of an online petition to #DeleteFacebook rises, endorsed by WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, Elon Musk and other prominent names.