We know that the transition from childhood to adulthood presents challenges for us all, and that this is nothing new. The concept of ‘adolescence’ may be relatively modern, but the transition always had to be made, and for most of human history, it had to be made fast. It’s hardly surprising that many teens will face the challenge of mental health issues along the way. A new study in Neuroscience News, suggests that teens with mental health conditions interact with the online world differently to their peers. According to this study, they spend around an hour longer online each day, they experience more dissatisfaction with follower counts, and they display greater emotional vulnerability. These higher levels of social comparison, mood shifts, and poor self-control online led to anxiety and depression. I suspect that it is not only teens who display behavioural and response patterns of this kind! It has been said that humans live in many different ‘worlds’. There is the world of thought, the world of social relations, the world of work, and so on. How do we manage these worlds? Wonderful though technology may be, some of us may need to reduce our investment in the online world. Whatever our age, distractions are the perennial enemy of our investment in the spiritual world, the only
investment with eternal returns.