People have different views about whether individuals do activities such as watching mindless TV shows, endlessly scrolling on social media, or playing repetitive video games to relax and reduce the impact of stress factors on their life. Some people opine that this activities have serious harmful effects on both mental and physical health in long term, while others believe like this activities are necessary for people to maintain a peaceful and happy life and even improve their creativity. In my opinion, I firmly believe that activities that do not include mental efforts lead to degenerate the functions of the brain, which is called “brain rot”, and halt mental development.
To begin with, mental skills tend to weaken in long term as individuals spend hours and hours on these activities since these kinds of activities that do not keep the mind occupied actively, or is only the location of consumer and audience lead to mental laziness, which hinders the development of some significant cognitive skills, such as the ability to solve problem, critical thinking, and learning. Moreover, continuously scrolling on social media, or spending hours and hours on simple video games waste the time that can spare for more productive and educational activities, which affects mental development negatively.
Furthermore, social media algorithms are designed to stay individuals in front of screens and only focus on the context represented themselves. This situation may decrease individuals’ mental creativity and locate themselves on more passive positions. What’s more, like these activities have an impact addicted. In other words, when people begin to spend their times on these activities, the human brain give a reaction by releasing more dopamine, which causes addiction, lack of concentration, and the decline of attention time in long term. Indeed, this feeling is short-time, and hinder to face stress factors in real life, which results in the skills to overcome these problems. This may decrease mental durability in long term.
Moreover, staying constantly in front of screen exposes the brain to unneeded information, which influences the mental progress rather than supporting productivity. In addition, particularly social media and video games may disturb the sleeping habit, which have serious impacts on young ones the learning progress. Mental development needs resting and if this need of the brain is not met, the acceleration of learning can be slow.
To sum up, for these reasons mentioned above, it can be reiterated that individuals should be careful when selecting activities even if individuals want to amaze since they can have some impact on not only our physical but also mental health that we do not have known.