Some thoughts on the (literal) sugar rush of social media

Announcing my book deal on Instagram caused my glucose monitor to go haywire. It was a reminder online life is more 'real' than we like to think

I’m wearing a monitor on my arm at the moment. It looks vaguely like something from an episode of Black Mirror, but it’s really just so I can track my glucose levels on my phone. My Dad has been seriously ill with complications related to type 2 diabetes, so when the doctor told me I was creeping up into the danger zone myself, I didn’t mess about. This new wave of wearable tech, like Lingo and Zoe, gives you a real time idea of how your body’s response to sleep, stress and of course food.

Turns out, it’s not just cookies that can mess with your blood sugar levels. Mainlining bread with every meal – even the posh stuff from Waitrose – is no good. I’ve had to pretend to like brown rice instead of the starchy white stuff, and develop a new respect for legumes. At the end of each day, my robot doctor gives me school report: well done or must-try-harder.

Yesterday, I announced my book deal on social media almost a year after I found out about it (publishing moves slow). As a journalist who has spent my working life on Twitter, it was a moment I’d imagined from time to time, a vain little fantasy born out of the jealousy of seeing so many others do it down the years. Someone once said writing a book is like telling a joke and not knowing if anyone has laughed at the punchline for 18 months. The ‘some personal news’ humblebrag Tweet is, I suppose, a little respite on that long and lonely road.

What made hitting ‘send’ particularly strange was that I’ve been off social media entirely for two months. So when the notifications starting rolling in, it felt like going from 0-100. I kept thinking of my favourite opening line of a novel ever, Trainspotting:

The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling.

As the supportive comments from friends and families flooded my system, I felt like a dopamine junkie. 

In Good Anger, I try and explore why some people are very angry online even if they’re mild mannered and polite IRL. The question that fascinates me is: which one is ‘real’? Is the public face masking someone who is, deep down, full of rage? Or are the forces of technology so strong they turn a genuinely gentle soul into a troll? 

The American psychologist John Suler and others have some fascinating theories about this. But one is that different environments bring out different aspects of our personality, no more or less real than who we are elsewhere. Maybe part of our struggle with social media is not that it is ‘fake’ but that it shines a light into too-real corners of who are, the vulnerability and narcissism we’d rather believe are not there.

My robot doctor recorded a glucose spike that lasted from when I posted at 10am, all the way up the early evening: my worst score since the day I succumbed to a hangover and ordered a Dominos pizza. The sugar rush of social media is real, not just in our heads but our blood (or mine, at least). Still, after a year when we’ve had mostly bad news to share, I was happy to gorge myself on well wishes for a day, and resist the urge – on my partner Jessie’s firm warning – to undermine it all with too many self-deprecating jokes. A writer’s version of a sweet shop raid, before getting back to the business of brown rice and beans.