TRENDING SCIENCE: What did we learn about ourselves from the Facebook outages?

The massive 6-hour outage hit on 4 October, then Facebook and its apps went down again days later for a couple more hours. We use Facebook’s social networking tools to stay informed, to keep in touch with family and friends, to shop, to entertain ourselves, to scroll images, to advertise.

There’s no debating the social networking giant permeates our lives. So how did the involuntary downtime make us feel? Was it a simple inconvenience, a wake-up call, or something much deeper?It revealed “how reliant we are on social media in different ways to distract ourselves, to escape, to connect, to cope with anxiety and stress,” psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author Dr Ian Kerner told ‘CNN’.

He explained that when we’re not able to scroll and post like we usually do, we get bored and become vulnerable to problematic emotions and things that cause stress. Occasionally, we don’t know how to cope with these.

“People find that they are alone with their own thoughts. And they’re a little bit of a stranger to themselves in a way. Prior to social media, I think we were much better at being on our own, finding ways to engage ourselves and remain curious,” Dr Kerner added.

Interestingly, because everyone experienced the major outage, people didn’t necessarily feel like they were missing out by being disconnected from others. “Once people realized, ‘oh, these networks are almost all down,’ there was this bizarre, but very clear sense of relief. The feeling was ‘I don’t have anything I have to keep up with. I’m not missing out on anything,’” psychologist Dr John Duffy further elaborated.

There were some meaningful connections that took place – in real time. Dr Duffy observed that “people realized in real time the importance of face-to-face relationships, and the relative emptiness of a connection that takes place solely via Facebook or Instagram.”

Will the realisation that we scroll and post too much last? According to Dr Anna Lembke, psychiatry and behavioural sciences professor at Stanford University in the United States and its School of Medicine’s Medical Director of Addiction Medicine, our brain holds the answer because of all the high dopamine stimuli like Facebook and Instagram that affect it. Dopamine is a chemical that influences how happy we feel. “We can verifiably show that human connections stimulate dopamine release, which is how they are reinforcing, and anything that stimulates dopamine in the brain’s reward pathway has the potential to be addictive.”Now that our wired lives and worlds are back to normal, what’s the takeaway? Dr Lembke believes the social media blackout was an “accidental en masse experiment that hopefully revealed to people just how addicted they’ve become.” She hopes the disruption “will encourage people to actually intentionally plan to abstain from social media, and maybe their phones altogether, for a period of time.”

Dr Lembke offers some more food for thought: “As a society, we need to establish digital etiquette and tech-free spaces, where we intentionally leave our phones at home and really make an effort to be present in the moment in real life with each other.”