Modern-Day Communication

Overanalyzing Conversations

The good old days which relied on in-person communication or even telephones were probably less stressful than modern-day communication. While there are many advantages to modern-day communication, there are also many pitfalls, leading us to overanalyze conversations and coming up with unnecessary and even false conclusions.

Modern-day communication involves texting, emailing, talking on the phone or on social media and even dating apps. While technology has made it tremendously easier to communicate with each other, the downfall to that is the stress that comes with this easiness.

When too much access is available for communication, we tend to overanalyze people’s intentions and motives. If someone doesn’t answer a text message, a million thoughts start racing through our minds, “OMG, maybe I shouldn’t have said that!”, “Maybe I messed things up again!”, “Why is he ignoring me?”

Many times, the other person is not ignoring you but either simply forgot to answer or just had nothing good to say back. This is the problem with texting: it leads us to form new opinions and perceptions on others based on how the conversations in the texts are going. This usually doesn’t happen to this extreme with in-person communication or even other means of communicating.

How about dating apps! A conversation may be going smoothly and all of a sudden, the other person stops responding to your innocent message. We again start to overanalyze if we should have said what we said, making us feel insecure, lousy and even sad. And all we did was message them, “Are you free this weekend?”

And should we even mention social media? The problem with this outlet of communication, besides that the companies are stealing our data and creating psychological profiles based on how we navigate the internet, is that there’s a lot of superficiality. We make friends on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram who we do not even talk to in real life.

How can this possibly be healthy? Sure, it helps when you are lonely, but it seems like it’s just a bandaid and not a true fix. The best way to utilize modern-day communication is to reap its benefits without taking it seriously; don’t sit around analyzing why this and that happened.

Enjoy the benefits of modern-day communication without becoming emotionally and mentally invested.