Endless scrolling through social media can literally make you sick
Once mainly a scourge of VR headsets, cybersickness seems to be on the rise as the pandemic pushes our bodies to their digital limits.
When a dark ashy cloud born from wildfires settled over the Seattle metropolitan area, Jack Riewe was among the millions of people suddenly trapped indoors. It was September 2020, and without access to the outdoors during a pandemic, it became even more difficult for the 27-year-old writer to see other people. He could only fill his days switching between working remotely on his computer, watching TV, or scrolling through endless fire updates on his phone.
For a week he scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled, until he felt “weighed down, dizzy, [and] nauseous.” At the time, he attributed these symptoms to the air quality, or even wondered if he had contracted the coronavirus. The cause was something more insidious: the physical toll of living almost entirely in a virtual world.
The pandemic has forced most of us online at incomparable rates. It’s where we’ve worked, taken classes, attended parties, and gotten lost in 2020’s voracious news cycles. But our bodies were not designed to primarily exist in virtual space like this, and as our collective digital time creeps upward, something called cybersickness seems to be leaking into the general population.
