The Media Dilemma: How Pervasive Social Media Affects the Brain

Every day, we find ourselves dedicating countless hours to scrolling through various social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or even our beloved Hive blog. It's a reality that many of us have unwittingly developed a dependence on these platforms. So much so that we often subconsciously navigate to these social media apps before even realizing they weren't our initial destination. This begs the question: could this prevailing trend in social media usage potentially have an impact on our mental health, leading to depression and other psychological issues?

Social media platforms are known to give immediate rewards with little to no effort required, provided you are the consumer but in 2021, the United States recorded people especially teenage girls reporting neurological symptoms where they seem to develop tics or Tourette. These people didn't have any prior history of tics but they had one thing in common which was their activeness on TicTok. Actually, social media has become a big problem for our health without us knowing.

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We began to understand the power of the internet in our personal lives in the early 2000s and the internet was well received in homes at that time. People were able to play games via the internet, then there was MySpace, Linkedin, Tumblr, and then Facebook in 2004. Facebook was the social media to help connect with old friends that people haven't seen in a long time, make new friends while updating their profile. Over time, Twitter (X), YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, and so on became a thing, and people started to spend more time than usual on the internet.

However, this prolonged exposure to digital platforms started affecting our cognitive faculties in ways we weren't fully aware of. A study conducted in 2011, titled "Amygdala Volume and Social Network Size in Humans," highlighted that the complexity of our social networks, the number of online acquaintances, and our interactions with them correlated with the size of the amygdala which is a brain region responsible for processing emotions and gauging our social standing. Since our brains struggle to differentiate between online interactions and real-life ones, our brains respond to online friends in a similar manner, leading to amygdala growth.

Interestingly, the advent of iPhones and touchscreen phones contributed to shifts in brain functionality. These devices led to an expansion of the brain regions responsible for thumb and hand coordination. Yet, this seemingly innocuous development became intertwined with the impact of social media on our lives.

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Studies such as "Social Media Use, Social Anxiety, and Loneliness: A systemic review" showed that people who have low self-esteem are impacted by social media feedback. People who did not receive lots of likes began to report feeling bad, and unhappy in comparison to the supposed happy lives of others. Then we wonder why we spend lots of time on social media.

Social media sends us reward signals since the brain is composed of multiple reward systems via different reward areas, such as Dopamine when something is perceived as good, which then travels to the Nucleus Accumbens where different brain regions are triggered and this region includes the amygdala responsible for emotion. Since the brain reward system allows us to keep doing these things, we become glued or addicted to social media platforms. This good feeling from dopamine also happens when we anticipate a good thing, and then we begin to experience the good feeling so addiction is possible.

As our content consumption accelerated, our ability to swiftly respond to interactions and engage with content for short durations increased. In the year 2000, the average attention span stood at 12 seconds, which was already seen as a decline. Surprisingly, by 2015, this span shrank to just 8 seconds. Consequently, we've transitioned into individuals who strive to absorb an extensive range of content in the digital realm, yet our capacity for sustained focus has dwindled, leaving us prone to distractions.

The consequences have become evident, with instances of depression, addiction, and even behavioral neurological symptoms such as tics emerging. However, it's essential to recognize that social media is not entirely negative; rather, it's the manner in which we engage with it that holds significance. Monitoring our content consumption and time spent on these platforms is crucial. When interactions like comments and likes begin to feel like precursors to depression, it's advisable to take a step back and reevaluate our relationship with social media.

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Reference

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9892901/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9932691/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3079404/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9966679/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9817115/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245195882100018X
https://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/
https://elearningindustry.com/8-second-attention-span-organizational-learning