Silence is golden. Writen words matter. And TikTok is hypnosis.

We live in a noisy and distracting world. Social media notifications, advertising, news updates, and coworkers buzzing around us all day is causing our brains to shift into overdrive. There has been a lot of talk about how this constant input of noise has been negatively impacting us physically and mentally.

A recent study conducted by the University of California, San Francisco was one of the largest medical studies to date on how social media affects our brains. The study followed over 300 people with an average age of 35 and reported that those who spent more time on social media sites like Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter exhibited “marked differences in brain structure”.

“Participants in the study were shown hundreds of images designed to induce positive, negative, or neutral emotions.” The images included famous vacation photos and other harmless pictures. At the end of each day participants were asked to recall their visual experience from the day before. Their brains were scanned using MRI machine.

The results were surprising. Those who spent more time on social media sites “had greater gray matter volume in the amygdala, a region of the brain associated with emotional processing and risk for anxiety disorders.” The amygdala is a small part of the brain and plays an important…