The Manipulation of Colour Psychology

Why Quitting Social Media is Harder than it Looks

{as a gift to you being here, attached is a set of journal prompts to bring you closer to yourself}

The reason I’m leaving social media to make my home here on Substack is because I’m addicted to social media.

Now, I don’t use the term addiction lightly. When I say addiction, I mean there is constrained agency in my choice. Addiction is fundamentally choice-less.

Capitalism uses covert manipulation to to prod our limbic systems {the emotion centers of our brain} to elicit pre-determined responses from afar.

The best example of covert manipulation is notifications.

I would turn into a viscera of frenzy with the red circle when an unattended notification would dare to show itself on my home screen. I hated having that glaring red mark.

So I would do the bidding of the notification - respond to the person, say yes to the update - or would get overwhelmed in a pile of never-ending to-dos and curl into a ball of guilt.

I eventually got wise enough to turn off the notification but I would end up just getting phantom anxiety. Without the certainty of the red circle, was there something or someone waiting on the other end?

See, systems of oppression calibrate for dissent. They know we’ll try to revolt. So they create an algorithm for dissent. They create time limits for apps, the ability to turn off notifications. They give us the illusion of control. It is not real.

There is a very good reason tech companies use the colour red for notifications. It is not an accident. It is the same reason teachers mark with a red pen and why most fast food chains use red as their main colour.

Red is connected to our root chakra, it instantly communicates to our reptilian brain: this is about survival. We are reminded that our blood is red, that death is inevitable, that our survival is precarious. All of this is communicated through a single colour. So when I see a red X on my homework or a red circle on my home screen, my brain-body system has a pre-determined response as if my existence was threatened to be annihilated.

This is why panic ensues when I see a red circle on my home screen.

The opposite is true for the colour green {the colour for messaging apps like iMessage and WhatsApp}. Green is connected to our heart chakra. Our need for attachment {of the psychological sort, not the Buddhist sort} is activated unconsciously when we see this colour. We are reminded of our need for love & belonging, we are reminded of the threats of rejection & abandonment. We feel loved by the possibility of connection and afraid of losing the connection we so desperately need.

Tech companies know our need for love & connection and use colour psychology to threaten that connection so we learn to follow the task master of the red dot so teacher won’t be mad.

For fast food companies, like McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Tim Horton’s, they use a combination of red and yellow. Yellow is connected to our solar plexus chakra, the place of our personal power. So advertisements for these food chains are effectively saying, “you need this product to survive” and “this product will make you powerful”, which is why so many advertisements are actually selling a lifestyle not a product. When you’re seeing car commercials, it isn’t actually an ad for the car itself, but for the glamour and accoutrements that accompany that particular vehicle.

All of this is happening on a completely unconscious level so we fundamentally cannot consent to this process.

We cannot consent if we don’t know the consequences.

The consequences of dopamine flooding on our brain are deep.

I downloaded Instagram to my phone yesterday during my tattoo appointment to distract myself. By the time I got home, I could feel myself jonesing for more dopamine. Our bodies adapt to new and higher levels of dopamine and so need more and more doses to feel the effects at all. What used to make us happy barely registers as a sensation after we have been flooded with dopamine for 4 hours of scrolling. We end up numb. When we’re numb, we’re more likely to consume. This is all about capitalism’s need for consumption.

{the lost experience of time with social media is an effect of dopamine flooding - we experience this with new relationship energy when we can talk for 6 hours and it feels like 3 minutes, or like we’ve known the person our entire lives. This is how we end up scrolling well into the wee hours of the morning.}

We are changing our physiology without any known impacts for the future.

I should make it clear there is no judgement at all for you to be on social media. I encourage you to have boundaries with your scrolling, to take time to decompress after, to choose time away from technology. But you and your choices are not the problem.

The problem is us little humans who only use 10% of our brain are being pitted against teams of well-paid professionals whose entire job it is to keep us addicted to social media and to consumption in general.

Your decision to stay on social media or not doesn’t matter to me; your informed consent does.

I will be exiting the space of social media because I am not for consumption. I am in relationship with my work, with my creativity, with my Self.

Thank you for being here, for witnessing my transition into free creativity {I promise I’ll stop ragging on social media soon - maybe}