(Natural News)—A recent survey reveals that three out of four Gen Z individuals with internet access in the United States believe social media negatively impacts their mental health.
The survey, which gathered responses from 2,000 Gen Z social media users, found that Instagram and TikTok (both at 20 percent) and Facebook (13 percent) were the platforms most often linked to declines in mental well-being.
For older members of Generation Z, born between 1998 and 2004, growing up with nearly a decade of social media exposure may have contributed to what one expert referred to as “problematic internet use.”
Commissioned by LG Electronics, this survey was carried out online by Talker Research between June 20 and June 24.
The study shows that people start to feel negative emotions just 38 minutes after using social media. This is often because they encounter upsetting content (51 percent), feel unproductive with their time (49 percent) or experience “fear of missing out,” or FOMO (36 percent). On average, individuals spend about five and a half hours each day on social media and 45 percent believe they use it more than their friends do.
Louis Giagrande, LG Electronics head of U.S. marketing, pointed out that spending a lot of time online can leave people feeling drained. He said people should be mindful of the content they engage with to improve their overall well-being and focus on positive content to help manage life’s challenges better and find more happiness.
Interestingly, 62 percent of Gen Zers wish they could reset their social media feeds. Many are frustrated with the content they see, with 53 percent saying it doesn’t match their interests and 54 percent feeling they have little control over what appears in their feeds. Only 16 percent believe they have full control.
Despite these issues, 80 percent of respondents also find that social media can positively impact their mood. Content that tends to lift people’s spirits includes comedy (65 percent), animals (48 percent), beauty-related posts (40 percent) and prank videos (34 percent). Conversely, content related to violence (50 percent), politics (40 percent) and sexual themes (32 percent) often leads to negative feelings.
The study found that two-thirds of people have managed to turn a bad day into a good one thanks to social media. They are also 70 percent more likely to use social media when they’re in a good mood and 44 percent believe it has a positive effect on their outlook on life. Looking ahead, 38 percent think social media platforms will improve their impact on mental health over the next five years.
Gen Zers use social media daily for various reasons, according to the study. Sixty-six percent do it out of boredom, 59 percent seek laughs or smiles, 55 percent need a distraction or break, 49 percent want to stay updated on global events, 44 percent check in on friends, 42 percent seek connections with others, 33 percent look for relaxation and 32 percent search for specific information.
How smartphone addiction affects mental health
Recent findings reveal a concerning link between excessive smartphone use and serious mental health issues. Teens who spend more than three hours daily on social media face an increased risk of developing mental health issues, especially those related to internal stress and anxiety.
Research from JAMA Psychiatry, which studied nearly 6,600 U.S. adolescents, suggests that boosting media literacy, limiting social media time and redesigning social media platforms could help alleviate these mental health issues.
A study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal consolidates evidence from numerous research efforts – showing that heavy smartphone and social media use is associated with greater mental distress, self-harm and suicidal thoughts among young people. This effect is particularly pronounced in girls and follows a pattern where more screen time correlates with more severe problems.
Visit Mental.news for more stories about social media and smartphone use and mental health.
Watch this video from SciShow discussing how people can overcome FOMO and lessen their social media addiction.
This video is from the Daily Videos channel on Brighteon.com.
Sources include:
- StudyFinds.org
- ScienceDirect.com
- SWNSDigital.com
- JAMANetwork.com
- NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov
- PsychologyToday.com
- Brighteon.com
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
