Do you look at your phone when you wake up and before you go to bed? Do you find yourself checking your Instagram or TikTok a little too much throughout the day? Excessive use of social media is detrimental to users’ brains, negatively affecting other aspects of their lives.
The internet became a place to connect with other people when websites like MySpace and Tumblr launched. Then in 2004, Facebook changed the game. Soon after, other platforms like Twitter and Reddit followed, and people started to spend more time on their phones than ever before. People love to use social media, but it has more pitfalls than it does benefits. Sure it can be a place for users to connect online with their friends, and other students and post about what they’ve been doing, or not doing, with their lives. People also use it for networking, now what could be so bad about all of this?
Spending hours upon hours on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and other social media platforms, damages users’ brains in ways many don’t realize. Some spend so much time on it that a dependency builds, turning into an addiction. This can be seen in people constantly picking up their phones to check for notifications or getting distracted by endlessly scrolling. A person’s brain gets used to this constant stimulation, negatively affecting dopamine levels as users go back in for more every hour of every day.
A study published by SpringerLink in 2021 explored the effects of social media dependency on high school students. The research findings from a survey of 1,274 students concluded that this addiction was “positively correlated with conduct and emotional problems, attention deficit/hyperactivity, peer problems, and poor sleep quality,” which all negatively affect prosocial behaviors and sleep efficiency.
Now as one reflects on these effects, imagine how much the Covid-19 pandemic increased how detrimental constant social media binging is for them. This has so clearly affected people of every age, not just Gen Z or millennials, and young children seem to be at a higher risk than those born in the early 2000s.
Freshman Dylan Hardy said, “when people were locked in their house they start to notice the small things like how many likes and comments they get, instead of caring about how they actually feel.” Hardy even noticed his own mental health declining as a result of the dependency on social media forced upon him by the recent pandemic.
In an article published by the California State University, Dr. Ofir Turel, a leading researcher in technology addiction and an associate professor at CSU Fullerton mentioned “To some extent it’s like wine: it’s OK to use a little bit, but when it becomes too much it creates problems. When we use technology we need to create boundaries around its use.”
Students should be more conscientious about the time they spend on social media, for it may be a bigger problem than they would assume. There are even ways to limit users’ usage of apps on their phone. For example, on iPhones there is a section in the settings called “screen time” and users can set limits for how much time they want to spend on any application they want.
