By Ricky Castillo
More time spent on social media can become addictive and damage parts of the brain. There has been a rise in mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, suicide, and feelings of inadequancy in life or appearance. Since the advent of social media platforms like Instagram, Tiktok, Snapchat, Facebook and others, we’ve evolved to care about whether other people in our social tribe think well of us. Are we prepared to be aware of how thousands of people think of us? We were not evolved enough to have social approval being dosed to us every five minutes from one of these platforms. We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get awarded with short term signals that tell us our value. According to Chamath Palihapitiya, former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works”. The “loops” he refers to is how many social media apps work, attempting to give a short term sense of popularity or dopamine. Chamath goes on to explain how many teens will later have to deal with a feeling of emptiness and vacancy because of this need to attain that feeling of dopamine or acceptance again.
In 2010 Instagram was introduced into the world with high hopes of connecting people and changing the way people interacted. Social media was never created with the intention of causing depression or anxiety or impeding on civil discourse. Some suspected that the creators of social media knew that teens would quickly become addicted. Perhaps they knew that it would change the way children behaved, performed, and went about their daily lives. Suicide rates in teens shot up after the initial release of social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram. This isn’t a coincidence or a surprise.
The goal of these social media companies slowly became getting users to spend as much time as possible on their platforms. “Companies have systematically removed stopping cues – those brief moments, like reaching the bottom of a screen, that suggest you might want to move on to something else,” says Adam Alter, a psychologist at New York University.
Every time we check our social media feeds and find something worth noting or exciting waiting for us, our brains release dopamine, which tells our brains that checking social media is worth doing again. And when notifications and alerts are added in, it isn’t long before our brains begin to release dopamine just in anticipation of checking our phones. ‘Like’ buttons take advantage of both our desire for social validation and our love of seeing our ‘score’. Our phones and apps take advantage of our inherent social impulses and anxieties, including our fear of missing out on something and the impression that we need to reciprocate when we feel someone has done something for us.
“When you’re posting to social media and you don’t get enough likes, then all of a sudden you have a worse self-image than you might have had otherwise. We have so many ways by which we can be judging each other and then we judge ourselves based on how we think that people are seeing us. This can create anxiety, it can create a lot of depression,” said Jenna Birch, a health journalist for Cosmopolitan and Psychology today.
Instagram was launched on Oct. 6, 2010, and on that day, it became the top free photo-sharing app, racking up 25,000 users.
According to the Mayo Clinic, “American teenagers spend an astounding nine hours a day with digital technology, entertaining themselves with streaming video, listening to music and playing games.” It’s very individualized, and it becomes very real when it starts to create problems like disruptions in our days or a failure to do the things that are expected of us. Teenagers start to withdraw socially and when forced to experience what is called withdrawal symptoms. They need to have technology around them. That’s indicative of an actual problem. That’s when you have to start to implement practices to scale back and create that balance.
The problem lies with miseducation and with ignorance to the issue. Few are willing to address the issues in schools and properly teach students the truly negative impact social media has on the human brain and emotions. According to a poll, 112 students at LREI would assess their knowledge of mental health overall and the effect social media and trauma have on it as poor. That’s a number that can’t be ignored especially when you have a law that requires New York State schools to implement mental health in their already health related classes. “It has got to be a new way of thinking, a new way of teaching,” said Mark Laurrie, superintendent for Niagara Falls City School District. There has been a gigantic increase in depression and anxiety for American teenagers which began right around the advent of these social platforms. The number of teenage girls that cut or harmed themselves was pretty stable until around those years where it began to climb. The statistics can’t be ignored, nor can the sudden ethical dilemma that employees at social media industries have to face every day. Everyday they are faced with the question of whether or not to take advantage of generations of people. The reality is without a proper education on the effects of social media, our generation will continue to struggle and face unseen damages.
Sources:
https://www.helpguide.org/articles/mental-health/social-media-and-mental-health.htm
https://www.mayoclinic.org/search/search-results?q=mental%20health
https://www.mcleanhospital.org/news/it-or-not-social-medias-affecting-your-mental-health
https://sites.psu.edu/siowfa15/2015/09/15/whats-the-science-behind-social-media-addiction/
http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-alerts/