Steemit Mental Health: The first self-recovering cryptocurrency caused by it's addictive powers.

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Introduction

On steemit, there are virtually no limits on what one can achieve with some time, a creative brain, and a healthy amount of will-power. While that is, in essence, a very good and new thing in our technological lives(Say something new man.. jeez.), it does come with some caveats. (wait whut?!)

Steemit manages to feed some of most basic human needs of receiving appreciation for what we try to embody. For that, Steemit has all the potential in the world for making all kinds of neurotransmitters fire that makes us feel happy. Combine this with the fact that, when played right, one can earn quite a bit on Steemit too, and you got yourself a system which prone to become (at least a bit) addictive. 😇

Using both literature and personal experiences, I want to address:

• why we need to to be aware of our primal instincts and how it makes us want to keep spending a large amount of our free time on an endless source of stimulating distraction (Steemit). And why Steemit can be stimulating to the degree of becoming addictive.

• why being aware of the above, and acting accordingly, is important for us to keep seeing the full potential of the joy that Steemit brings. I don't want steemians to fall for the very possible side-effects of such a potent human-need-feeding platform. I try to prevent you from a loss of creativity, happiness and genuinity. These things could be avoided.

• With the above, I want to explain why Steem (the coin) has a very powerful self-recovery mechanism that no other crypto-currency to date has. Steemit here to stay. Steemit is here to grow. No matter what prices will do in the future.👌

Although sounding paradoxical: Limit your time spend on Steemit in order to maximize creativity and inspiration. Stay clear of quantity, go for quality. Both in consuming and creating content. This will prolong the time you will be a happy Steemian.

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Social media: lighting our neurons on fire

The CEO's of the stone age social media like Facebook, Instagram, snapchat, use all kind of clever manipulating techniques to communicate directly to ancient neurological systems that are present in our brains in order to keep us exactly where we are. Apart from using fancy animations and notifications, there is an incentive to endlessly provide us with the things that makes us feel good (or bad) since we tend to stick around. (and thus increasing their advertisement revenue)
As users of these social media, we are experiencing even more competition with regards to what should deserve our attention. One interesting thing is that we love to keep checking how much we are being loved by others. When receiving Likes, comments or followers, We feel an immediate rush of appreciation floating through our veins. Most people are so much driven by these quick-and-dirty shots of joy, that we don't even care if they are indeed sincerely genuine, or plainly provided by bots. >info post<.

Although here on steemit there are not the same CEO driven incentives, the same basic triggers are pulled when one gives us a great comment on a piece we took 3 hours to write. Receiving such "positive feedback" makes us feel happy immediately. This happens, even is we don't know the person or his/her intentions at all. As human being we of course always have loved the sense of being appreciated. To have a sense of belonging does yield a great social evolutionary benefit. If you want to be social, there is a far greater chance to reproduce and have a safe surrounding for our children. Having said that, Its clear that also on Steemit the same triggers that have been making us happy for millennia are being pulled

Let's briefly talk neurotransmitters on as it will be important to at least have some basic knowledge about why we behave as we do.

One of our most primitive neurological systems are the nucleus accumbens and striatum. One of their functions is to enable us to experience feelings of enjoyment. These areas are flooded by the neurotransmitters dopamine when we practice rewarding activities such as food, sex, abuse of drugs and neutral stimuli that become associated with them. Social interaction, earning (and spending) money, and feeling the joy of being appreciated for your hard work by getting up-votes or comments, do also trigger these exact areas. We can't seem to get enough of these shots.[5,6]

I don't want to get to elaborate on the neurological side of thing and consequently lose half my reading audience. One should look up for themselves what roles endorfine and serotonin are doing for us mentally though. Talking for too long about dusty stuff will get you bored. This is also proving the same point. We are in constant need to be entertained. Therefore, I will just show you some pictures of mine every now and then to provide you with a decent shot of stimuli to keep you focused on finishing this post.💪

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Money: putting oil on the fire 🔥

Most of us will link the thoughts of money, to positive things. It doesn't matter if you connect money to either the last time you ate in a 5-star restaurant or the last time you actually were able to buy yourself a 2$ male. Money is tied to the ability to do whatever your body and mind are telling you to get. That new car, that fancy lipstick, sweets, and in the greater scheme of things, it even quite handy to have, when trying to find a relationship. It's not a popular thing to say, but is also just true. Money furthers your stance on the social ladder, at least our weird western-world thinks it does.
In summary, Cash immediately connects feelings of joy and pleasure in life. This is yet another reason why steemit could be seen as having the potential to be addictive. On top of all the social benefits and the consequent neurotransmitters being release. the fact that you are actually able to BUY the things you want or need, makes it even more important for our brains. When there is a potential change this is taken away from us, crazy unlogical things start happening to perfectly sane brains.

Let me use myself as an example during the major crypto-currency price drops recently:

Even given the price was down by 40%, I was still continuously checking how my previous post was doing. I was showing this behavior even though the only logical thing that could happen was a major drop in my posts pay-outs as the average price of the past week got down. Nothing else would have been possible. What causes my urge to stay up to date on something I cant influence, and consequently make me feel bad? My unconscious was continuing to consciously make me feel curious like I still had should keep checking and Checking. There came a point where I thought to myself.:

Dude, wtf are you doing..Today, you were officially obsessed with something completely irrelevant. Your brain is playing pieces of evolutionary byproduct, which makes you do things. that is not ever going to result in a happier you. there are way more important things to do with your time than checking out your past work.. Go outside for a run, Lookup the list of diagnoses you still haven't looked up. Work on your final internal medicine presentation, take some photographs, read @suesa's story collection, go do some meditation etc.

What I should have been doing was Look forward, work on another project instead of looking back all the time.I was getting in a loop for that day that probably all I could think about was my post, my narcissism (not that I felt it in the moment) and the Steem price.
This discrepancy made me write this post 3 days ago, to both get my thoughts straight and also take you with me on that thought-train.

The fun and interesting part though, is when we are aware of these unconscious drivers of our behavior, we can try to act on them accordingly.

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Enable yourself to escape the fire causing a burn-out

It's extremely important for your mental health to have a greater ability to choose what you want to focus on. This is true for almost everything in life and certainly not only on Steemit. I will provide some clever things you can do while taking a Steemit break! in order to maximize the pleasures you derive from being a Steemian.

• First of all, meditate. (don't do the "Sight.." if you have never seriously tried it)

This is a very powerful way to improve your pre-frontal cortex's inhibitory stamina. period. [1]

• Exercise, don't smoke, drink, sleep well and eat healthily.

These are obvious things that will make you feel better, the first even is proven to improve almost every aspect of life: It makes you feel happier, live longer, and your pre-frontal cortex will strengthen. [2]

• Spending to much focus on one specific project drains creativity

I found when I try to focus on just one project at the time, I lose my overview of the greater scheme of things. I start zooming in on little details while for the bigger picture, these do not quite matter. One should pause, do something else, and then get back again. Starting with the general progress at first. Not zooming-in immediately from the start. During these breaks, I recommend you to to do anything on this list.

• Steemit has a TON of great content to consume. Whether it's reading or looking at great art. The trick is to know where to look. "trending" certainly is not the best place to start.

One could save a ton of time by checking out pages that are doing the curation for you. For actual inherently thought trough, more heavy content one could visit: @steemSTEM
For more sit back and relax quickies @photofeed or @photocontest would be a great place to start. #colorchallenge is also fun to check every now and then. For more steemians and project recommendations read >this previous post<

This helps a ton in finding great content since the major part of the trending page is about crypto and whales talking about it, themselves, or flag wars with each other. I am not here for the drama myself. I have not been here long enough to actually know what is going on between the big folks, and I am not going to pretend that I actually care about their interpersonal relationships. In the hospital, I already have to put in a ton of effort to understand how patients function in their social surroundings. So there is enough for me there in real life. :)

I am not saying that there will become a time of more familiarity that will make me interested in those discussions, once I actually get to know the gists of the guys and mechanics that are calling the actual shots

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Steemit, the first self-recovering cryptocurrency.

there is no other crypto that benefits from the fact that we will always feel the need for confirmation and appreciation. Furthermore, we will always want to share things we see as important since it helps us shape an identity in this strange world full of technology, social media, expectations and social pressures.

There is not ever going to be a time in which people would see themselves as they truly are. Which would be, just a 98% copy of a random stranger, with ever so slight variations. There will always be people walking this earth fighting a constant battle to self-confirm that one matters in this world. Consequently, if prices drop, there is an enormous social backbone that will help it to get up again since there will always be people on this planet who are in need to ventilate their thoughts. Steemit provides a great decentralized platform to do just that. Especially if we take into account just how well the technology behind the Steem blockchain really is.
The Steemit community already proved to endure major price drops before becomes (like in the time of Steem being worth just 0.17$, compared to the 5.50 $ it's now) The more people join steemit, the stronger this self-recovery social backbone becomes.

Let me once again try to explain the beauty behind this mechanism. We all think we are deserving of attention. We all think we are original and in some way special. This gives us just enough self-esteem to confront others with our thoughts and content. Although this maybe does not sound like the most encouraging thing you have read today, this need to confirm that one's life is worth its while is eventually a truth that will make steemit, as a social media platform, succeed. 🚀

There certainly are interpersonal variation in the way we look, act and feel. The things that make each and every one of us unique become less clear when depicted in this way:

If one would tell every little detail, including the genome, basic behavior patterns, relationships, etc to an extraterrestrial being that is living 2 million light-years away. The alien would be able to grasp about 99% of what there is to know about all other human beings as well. We would not seem that unique to it at all. For 99.9 percent of us, the following is true: We eat, sleep, learn, adapt, have sex, are about the same size, weights etc.

We would be seen as beings that are in essence peaceful and loving, but the Alien would also notice, that certain things are not appreciated by us all since they are going 100% against the norms and values of the single analyzed individual. In summary, the Alien would know a ton about the human race, if it knew only one human being completely and would, therefore, be able to determine how our society would function in a whole. To it, we are not the unique after all*

Where was I again? I was making the point that I trust that Steemit will persevere since its based neural feedback loops that have kept us as a species alive for an enormously long time period. Evolution has triggered us to be social beings. Steemit and its community, are triggering the same. Maybe I am slightly overstating here: There is a basic organical origin for the existence of the Steem crypto-currency. 🙏👍

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The literature and my quick-and-dirty take on it.

I decided to look up after making the somewhat controversial claims I made above. I used a systematic review that was published in 2011 with the title: Online Social Networking and Addiction—A Review of the Psychological Literature [3] I choose to rewrite a part of the result section of this article:

When we look at the patterns in which social media is being used, we can conclude from the findings of both consumer research and empirical research that overall, social media networks are being used with an increasing fashion the last years. This supports the availability hypothesis that where there is increased access and opportunity to engage in an activity (in this case participating in social media), there is an increase in the numbers of people who engage in the activity [4]. Moreover, it indicates that individuals become progressively aware of this available supply and become more sophisticated with regards to their usage skills (which would be ways to maximize growth on Steemit). These factors are associated with the pragmatics factor of addiction specificity etiology [5]. Pragmatics is one of the four key components of the addiction specificity model and it emphasizes access and habituation variables in the development of specific addictions. Therefore, the fact that you are able to access Steemit from your phone, desktop, tablet, on any kind of network anywhere, on its own, appears to be a factor related to potential social network addiction.[3]

I hope you understand this is far away from a scientific method 👀

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Title and first author	Doi/link:
[1] Be smart, exercise your heart: exercise effects on brain and cognition (Charles H. Hillman)	doi:10.1038/nrn2298
[2] Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness(Sara W. Lazar)	PMC1361002
[3]:Online Social Networking and Addiction—A Review of the Psychological Literature (Daria J. Kuss)	10.3390/ijerph8093528
[4]:Internet Gambling: Issues, Concerns, and Recommendations (Mark Griffiths)	doi.org/10.1089/109493103322725333
[5]:A Framework for the Specificity of Addictions (Steve Sussman)	10.3390/ijerph8083399
[6]The role of neurotransmitter dopamine in movement and cognition (Wikipedia)	link (Yep, I just realy did that...)

All photos are taken by me 📷
Except for: The dollar bills, the steemlogo, the exercising brain. those are from Pixbay

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As always thanks for your time, I hope you enjoyed this. Feedback is always appreciated!

"Emotions are there to be expressed, not to be suppressed and bottled up. I do photography in order to take my mind away from the dilemma's I encounter during my medical internships."

thi-js. Out.

Up-vote, re-steem and follow ♥