Are you on Twitter, sharing your daily goings-on? If so, you were part of some really interesting news which I’ll share in a moment.
We’re exploring this wonderful and yet often maligned world of social networking to see how it could impact health. In a matter of days, following 10 different health organizations, I got a little depressed. There are a lot of scary headlines about health out there.
My idea: Find credible Twitter feeds that are really upbeat and optimistic. Then read and re-tweet them between 2 and 6 pm each day.
Why?
Back to the interesting news in which you may have played a part… Enter Cornell University sociologists’ ground breaking Twitter study. They followed 2.4 million twits — oh just kidding, “tweeters,” I mean — in 84 countries for 2 years (2008 – 2010). That’s a remarkable database! Combing through roughly half a billion posts, they correlated feeling words with time of day.
Their findings? We tweeters post most happy thoughts in the morning (6 am – 9 am), we slowly wane with our most downer thoughts around 3 pm – 4 pm, and then we seem to pick up our mood again after dinner time. And it’s not just because people who tweet don’t like their jobs (admit that crossed your mind). The pattern was similar on the weekend as well, though shifted slightly later (suggesting people slept in). In short, Tweets follow our circadian rhythm! Funny (as in funny-odd).
Funnier still is the fact that we are now wading into the tweet stream to fish for behavioral information and trends. The world is changing my friends, and it is an exciting place!
There’s a bottom line to this study. Our cultural norms and what’s going on around us play a role in how we express ourselves. “Because these norms are unlikely to be universal, the robust patterns we observed across diverse cultures [and the days of the week] give us confidence that [what people say they feel in their tweets is what they are actually experiencing.]”
In other words, we’re not tweeting some kind of prescriptive polly-anna dribble in the morning because it’s what everyone else is doing or someone made us do it. We’re just happy and we know it (clap clap). We’re venting debbie-downer-ism in the afternoon because we really do need the break that our biological rhythms would suggest.
The limits of the research? My favorite quote comes from Discovery News and Dr. Thomas Streeter of the University of Vermont:
“Definitely there’s a pattern there,” he said. “But of course they’re talking about people who use Twitter. It’s not farmers in Zimbabwe.” Social media can be ideal for certain kinds of human expressions but not for others, he added. “We have to be careful to not read them as hot lines to our hearts.”
Feel free to read up on other opinions of the research for more. It’s fascinating to see how different media spin the story:
- Science Magazine (the study itself)
- Cornell Chronicle
- New York Times
- CBC News
- Huffington Post
- USA Today
In the meantime, if we agree that our Twitter habits have leant some extra weight to that yearn for an afternoon nap, or better yet the burning need to get up and move mid-day, why not act accordingly!
Set an alarm to go off around 3 PM for a 10 minute speed walk, yoga routine, or dance spurt — whatever it takes! If we want to be at our best during the lull, we’re going to have to take charge.
Olga’s favorite move (besides dancing, of course) is the old tried and true Jumping Jack, when walking outside isn’t an option.
Yikes! It’s 3:18 here at PATH, do you know where your mojo is? See you on the sleepy afternoon PATH Ahead. Gotta get up now and MOVE!