Somatic hazard
When screens rupture our connection to our body
The internet is very dissociative and most media should have a massive red sign with the words "somatic hazard" written on them. What is a somatic hazard? It's the term I use to refer to something that not only makes you dissociated from your body, but also induces a state of tension such that you will likely get stuck in your mind, imagining one catastrophic scenario after the other.
What is dissociation? To answer that I invite you to connect to your body. Right now, you are reading this piece, but you can also be aware, by simply reminding yourself, of the fact that you see things "behind your eyes" so to speak. Your visual field is also much larger than the screen you're watching, in fact there is probably an entire room you haven't been paying attention to.
Slow down and take a breath. Can you become aware of your peripheral vision and feel the size of the room? Can you feel your chest expanding when your breathe? Can you feel your clothes on your skin? Can you feel your feet touching the ground? All of these are reminders to bring yourself back to your body. This is precisely the opposite of dissociation, which is a state of feeling utterly disconnected from it, and forgetting you even have a body. You might intellectually know that you have one, but are you aware of it and can you feel it? Very different things.
As a kid, I experienced that state of dissociation many times, except that I didn't have a word for it. I would describe it to myself as "feeling like I'm in the clouds, like I'm not really here". And if you look at someone's eyes when they are dissociated, it really feels like they are not here, like somehow they are somewhere else.
It's safe to say that with the rise of the internet, and thus people sitting still in front of a screen, that experience has become the norm. This is simply because sitting makes you immobile, which means you don't really need to pay attention to it, and meanwhile looking at a screen channels all your attention to your mind. Dissociation is a big deal because of 2 major reasons: it leads to an overall neglect of the body, and it makes you very poor at regulating your emotions.1
The fact that dissociation makes you neglect your body shouldn't come as a surprise but it needs to be emphasized. For instance, when people get a wrist or a back injury from being in front of a screen all day, it's because there has been a repetitive strain resulting from poor posture, which has never been noticed because of dissociation.
Or the rise of obesity we see unfolding can be partly explained by food being used as a coping mechanism against a sense of being overwhelmed, of holding far too much tension in your body. If our culture were more in touch with the human body, this tension would get expressed and released regularly, traditionally it was through dancing around a campfire, or the adrenaline of a run, amonst other things. But in our dissociated culture, tension builds up, and people never develop the ability to properly relate to their body and deal with it proactively, which leads to many activities being used to cope with that, such as the internet, video games, pornography, alcohol, drugs, and food as previously mentioned.
This leads me back to somatic hazards. There's a lot of media that, to say the least, doesn't portray very cheerful events. You might have noticed that the news basically only reports bad news, and it's not a coincidence, but the effect on dissociated people, which is most of them since screens are so inherently dissociative, is that they start becoming progressively more tense without being aware of it.
This results in them becoming more and more dissociated and unable to deal with this original tension, and very likely engage in the type of catastrophic scenarios that the news portray, without the ability to ground back in physical reality. They might then start arguing about politics with other people, never realizing the extent to which the tension in their body is controlling them, since they've basically been hijacked by what the news is showing them, and put all of their attention and energy in their dissociated mind.
I myself don't engage in politics, but if you do so or are around people who do, pay attention to the tone of the conversation. Are people having a reasonable conversation, or are they frantically trying to force others to have the same view as them? Does anyone seem calm, and conscious of what they're saying or doing? Are you aware of your body as you hear them speak? Very likely not, right? This is an example of how easy it is to manipulate dissociated people, and society uses that all the time.
The solution is very simple but not easy. It consists in grounding yourself in your body, using something similar to the prompts I've written for instance. Notice how you didn't need to learn anything to become aware of your body, you simply needed to remind yourself. Being aware of your body is more like a capacity that you already have and can develop so that you can access it more easily, rather than something truly new to learn. And it's a very important tool if you wish to be free from society’s more toxic aspects.
In the case of the news, another solution could be to cut your exposure to it, which is something I personally do, though it's unlikely you can remove all indirect exposure to it. People around you are definitely going to be talking about world events - again it's probably not a conscious act on their end - and having the ability to stay grounded while hearing those is a real test of that capacity.
As I've alluded, this is not the only situation where dissociation makes you prone to being controlled, though it is a major one2. A good rule of thumb is that anytime someone or some group doesn't allow you to just slow down - the rhythm of the body is significantly slower than that of the unregulated mind - then they benefit from you being dissociated and will use that to control you. They might not do that consciously, for instance a lot of people in activism probably have good intentions, but that coercion is very real regardless.
You might notice that it's actually hard to find a section of society that doesn't lead to dissociation. This is because the body is not very useful to society, since it is inherently tied to the present moment and quality, and society is far more interested in the future-obsessed mind that can generate quantity. Nonetheless, it shows us that there is always a move towards a more authentic life, and that move can be as simple as deciding to be aware of what's always with us: our bodies.
There is more to say about the problem of dissociation, such as how the body is the primal source of power, vitality but also truth - the mind only knows consistency not truth - but this is for another time.
If you want my specific list of aspects in society where dissociation is heavily involved: the news and politics obviously, academia and schools, marketing, companies, activism, a surprising amount of spirituality and self-help, modern healthcare (ever noticed how rarely the body is actually interacted with in modern medicine?), social media, driving, parties. I don’t even think this list is complete yet it already covers the vast majority of society.