There’s a lot going on in the world right now, and all of us need to be doing our part to stop it. Got it. Most halfway decent human beings have come to that conclusion by themselves.

Naturally, staying informed is the universal first step to aiding movements for change. So that’s what most of us have been doing--perusing news websites, keeping track of official statements, and hopefully following at least one alternative media source, such as Unicorn Riot. But hard work can only be sustained if we give our bodies and brains time to rest and recover: if we don’t take care of our own health, how are we meant to provide help to others?

So, we should be taking small breaks. We should be engaging in self-care. That much is easy to understand.

Here’s the problem: what many of us consider to be relaxation isn’t helping our brains at all.

Yes, I’m talking about social media.

It’s hurting us--not only in the sense that our attention spans are shortening and the blue light of our screens is eroding our sleep. Worse than that is the fact that all social media, in one way or another, comprises yet more news. Maybe this is reporting of global events, or maybe it’s just feeds from the people we follow--personally, I’m guilty of sucking up a thousand useless details of my friends’ lives nearly every day on Twitter. These myriad narratives, as they unfold upon our screens, are creating fictions of a sort--we internalize them as stories, as entertainment, despite the fact that they are reports of real people’s lives.

The problem here isn’t hard to see: a lot of the time, these things hurt. In the year since the election of Donald Trump, internal and external factors have put many of my friends in very dangerous situations. And when I scroll through Twitter as a form of leisure, their pain is the closest thing I have to entertainment. It hurts me, because there’s so little I can do to help them; it hurts them, because they’re vocalizing their pain to the incomprehensibly vast reaches of the internet and receiving, for the most part, radio silence. We end up desensitizing ourselves, because there’s no other way to deal with such incessantly tragic news feeds on the websites and apps that we once visited in order to have fun. What’s created is a vicious, gnawing emptiness, and so our so-called leisure time becomes almost more harmful than that which we intentionally allot to the consumption of national and global news.

Our brains are hungry things. They want to be intaking information, even in their downtime--yet all we tend to do is provide them with microcosmic versions of the same doomsday narrative that crushes us daily.

It recently occurred to me, in a flash that felt epiphanic, that there’s something else we could be giving to our minds in these precious quiet moments. That something, as now seems obvious, is fiction.

Hundreds upon hundreds of people smarter and wiser than me have made arguments for the necessity of art in society. One of its very distinctive assets is the way in which it allows our brains and bodies to process a range of emotions without any long-lasting taxation: if a favorite character dies, it hurts, but they aren’t gone from our lives in the same way as a real person. Through fiction, we can acclimatize ourselves to pain and fear.

We can also contextualize our own experiences in the greater scope of past and future. Reading and watching the work of dead authors and actors, we can remind ourselves that their imaginations are eternal: though they’re as deceased as they’ll ever be, their life’s work will never be entirely erased. It provides a near-religious sense of comfort: it simultaneously allows us to feel bigger and smaller in the universe. We can understand that our achievements matter more and our mistakes matter less than we tend to believe.

That’s a lot. And all of it is pretty significant.

So, next time you have a spare moment to scroll through Twitter or Facebook, consider grabbing a book or pulling up a TV show instead. For just an hour, immerse yourself in a narrative that has no tangible impact on your own, real world. Give yourself a safe space. Remind yourself that, to quote author Finn Butler, “nothing is infinite / not even loss.” And, if you’re anything like me, you’ll come back refreshed, invigorated, and--most importantly--ready to make some real change.