New research suggests kids who spend hours every day scrolling social media are more aggressive, depressed and anxious.
Yikes!
Emma Duerden, a neuroscientist from Western University, uses brain imaging to study the impact of social media use on children.
The results don’t look good.
“We’re seeing lots of these effects. Children are reporting high levels of depression and anxiety or aggression. It really is a thing,” Duerden told CBC News. “Absolutely, I think this is a public health issue.”
Alberta high school students spend more than 7.5 hours per day on screens, according to a 2019 study published in the journal Pediatrics & Child Health.
One in five Albertan high schoolers spend five hours or more daily on social media alone.
Some parents reported that during the pandemic, their six to 12-year-olds were wasting a whopping 13 hours a day on the screen.
Not surprisingly, 3 out of 4 Canadian parents are fretting about their kid’s screen-time addiction.
For good reason.
Screens and Serotonin
Screen time strongly influences the brain’s reward system, which is critical to decision-making.
“It could be that there’s an actual depletion in serotonin,” Duerden explained. “There’s this imbalance, and that’s how it could be mediating aggression in children.”
According to the National Institute of Health in the US, excess screentime “reduces the rate at which one physically interacts with others in real life, which also affects the release and maintenance of adequate doses of feel-good hormones like dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin.”
The more you use social media over time, the less feel-good hormones are released, requiring more screen time to release a pleasing level of hormones. It is a vicious cycle of needing more screen time to get the same results.
Obviously, kids aren’t the only ones getting hooked on their smartphones.
Walk into any café, library, or restaurant, and chances are more than half the people are staring at their phones.
However, researchers worry that social media is messing with childhood development in a big way.
The part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex undergoes huge changes during adolescence, and kids need to be able to focus, learn and master material in school.
Michaela Kent, a PhD student in Duerden’s lab, said addiction to screen time developed in adolescence has repercussions for college-aged students.
“They can’t focus during exams because they’re so used to scrolling on TikTok or looking through their phone,” Kent said in the CBC article. “They’re so used to having that constant stimulation that when it comes to focus, they really struggle.”
Is Big Tech to Blame?
Big tech companies like Meta (formerly Facebook) know precisely what they’re doing.
Social media apps, the algorithms that run them, and the notifications are intentionally designed to hook people’s attention and give them that dopamine hit.
When a user gets a like, a retweet, or an emoticon notification, the brain gets flooded with dopamine and sends it along reward pathways.
“Just because something makes you feel good doesn’t mean it’s good for you,” said Patricia Conrod, who holds the Canada Research Chair in preventive mental health at Sainte-Justine Hospital in Montreal.
Research carried out by the Chicago Booth School of Business suggests that social media can be more addictive than tobacco and alcohol because, among other things, access to them is simple and free.
Jay Olson, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, studied smartphone addiction patterns among adults in Canada and 40 other countries.
He said there are some simple measures people can take now to fight smartphone addiction.
- Reduce notifications to just essential ones, like phone calls or texts.
- Keep the phone outside the bedroom and turn it off at night.
- Disable colour by turning on greyscale mode to deter use.
- Keep the phone face down and out of arm’s reach.
- When meeting with friends, turn off your phone to give them 100% attention.
- Set a timer APP to limit your social media scrolling to 15 minutes or less.
These strategies work for some people but not for everyone. The draw of social media is powerful, and the “fear of missing out” (FOMA) is high. But in the scheme of things, most social media content is frivolous, but try telling that to teens who are just trying to be accepted.
Fighting Back
Americans have had enough. US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy called social media “an important driver” of the youth mental health crisis.
33 US states are suing Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, for making social media addictive to children.
In typical Canadian fashion, Ottawa is taking a softer approach.
Following a series of roundtables, Health Canada and Canadian Heritage plan to bring in legislation holding online tech giants accountable for content on their platforms that harms kids’ mental health and puts them at risk of sexual exploitation.
But so far, it’s just plans.
How long will it take to protect our kids from the addictive power of social media?
