“Ding, ding, ding.” You’re in the midst of flow work, and your notifications are going wild. You instinctively reach for your phone to check the latest. You open Instagram, and the words: “5 more likes on your recent post” flash across your screen. You click on your post, observe it, and watch the likes continue to pour in. You feel happy, content – pure pleasure, with each more like giving you that one more hit of dopamine. You refresh the page over and over, waiting for the next one to come in. Eventually, return to your homepage face-to-face with a new reel. You watch it, laugh, maybe, and then another one pops up.
Before you know it, 45 minutes have passed. You realize this and say to yourself, “enough,” put your phone back down, and try to get back into flow. But as you gaze upon your work, you eye your phone, longing to pick it back up again. Shaking your head, you avert your eyes away and back to your work, shifting your gaze between the two periodically, knowing full well where your attention should be. “I want to make sure I don’t miss anything,” you think as you try to justify the constant double-checking. Just as you get back into the groove of things, your phone notifications go off again, teasing you with more of what you truly want: the endless, mindless scroll. It’s addicting and captivating. Yet, at the same time, you feel dread. You know you have to focus, but the allure is too strong.
“Ding, ding, ding…” Without even thinking, you practically lunge to its beck and call. Oh no…it’s won yet again.
This is the tip of the iceberg of social media. In the digital age, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter have become integral parts of our daily lives, shaping not only our social interactions but also our thoughts and the physiological structure underlying them: our brains. In this post, I want to share with you a few ways that social media affects our brains and why it’s crucial for us to have boundaries around how we use social media.
4 Ways Social Media Affects Your Brain
- Changes in Attention
Research has found that social media use divides our attention. This may not seem like a big deal, but this often comes at the expense of our ability to sustain our attention and concentration on tasks. This constant disruption in our attention can even lead to feelings of overwhelm and stress.
It’s been found that heavy social media users tend to perform worse on cognitive tasks compared to moderate social media users. This is thought to be because social media competes for your attention, and those who use it heavily have a harder time ignoring the distraction. This leads to poorer cognitive performance and actually shrinks the part of your brain responsible for maintaining attention.
Tip: If you’re struggling with being distracted by social media, which we all do to varying degrees, I recommend turning off social media notifications and only checking when you decide to. This way, you’re not at the mercy of its never-ending alerts. This will allow you to focus on one thing at a time, allowing you to properly concentrate, which consequently reduces feelings of overwhelm.
- Changes in Your Brain’s Reward System
Research shows that each like or positive comment leads to the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter, and hormone primarily associated with pleasure in our brain. Dopamine is a motivation molecule that tends to spike in pursuit of rewards. This dynamic is what keeps us seeking rewards. The thing that’s tricky about likes on social media is that they are a form of instant gratification. Meaning they are rewards that we don’t really have to work for, and that don’t have much of a delay. These types of rewards are incredibly addicting. In fact, Harvard researchers have found that the dopamine released in response to receiving a like is equatable to the dopamine released while doing drugs like cocaine.
Whenever we don’t have to work for, or we don’t experience delays for rewards, we become dependent on them, needing one hit after the other to achieve the same kind of rewarding, pleasurable experience. It’s like a bottomless pit where we end up having to increase our use of social media to achieve the same effect. This makes people dependent on it. This process also alters your reward system because it requires more and more likes to get the same amount of dopamine.
Additionally, the absence of likes and comments tends to lead to a variety of negative emotions, such as feeling sad, empty, anxious, or even depressed.
- Changes in Memory
Social media even has the capacity to affect memory formation and your ability to recall information and experiences. Studies have found that because social media platforms tend to bombard users with constant information, it may be overloading cognitive resources, which hinders the ability of their brains to encode memories effectively.
Additionally, when we’re in the midst of an experience and we take time out to document it, it may inhibit our memory of the experience itself. It doesn’t appear that social media is the exact culprit underlying this phenomenon. Still, the interruption of the experience itself, whether it be pausing to take notes on the experience or pausing to post on social media - the results were the same.
Tip: Wait to document or post on social media until after the experience is over. Of course, you may take photos, but the key is to only look through some of them to find the perfect one to post. Do that later once the experience is over. This will help you not only be present in your experience but help you recall it better. Additionally, looking over your photos or reflecting on the experience later may increase feelings of positivity once it’s over. If you’re journaling about an experience afterward, this may also help increase the memory of the event. It’s the performing of these activities during an experience that seems to cause this finding.
- Social Media Affects Mental Health
By far, one of the most important aspects to pay attention to is the effect social media can have on one’s mental health. It’s been found that social media may impact one’s self-esteem and increase the feelings of FOMO (fear of missing out), inadequacy, dissatisfaction, and may even make you feel more isolated. These things together may affect mood and worsen symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression.
As you can see, social media can have a tremendous effect on how our brain functions and impacts our ability to concentrate, focus, form memories, and even our mental health. This is why it’s crucial to have boundaries around it. In fact, research has shown that limiting social media use tends to boost mental health.
I suggest turning off social media notifications as a first step. Then, you may designate a specific time of day to check it. These two practices together will help you eliminate distractions and use social media with purpose. Try thinking about it like candy; eating candy whenever you want without any kind of limit will lead to some pretty bad stuff. Social media is like candy. We don’t have to eliminate it altogether completely, but we need to moderate it. I also recommend using a time limit for how long you allow yourself to be on social media. Research has found people who limit their usage to about 30 minutes had a significant reduction in anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Thirty minutes may seem unrealistic, but it's worth trying. I recommend using an alarm to tell you when 30 minutes have passed. You may also consider using an app tracker to monitor how often you’re on social media. Applications also exist that can be used to shut you out of social media once the time is up if you’re struggling to control your behavior around it.
Just remember, if you’re struggling with your social media usage, know that you’re not alone. None of us are immune to its addictive lure. Remember it was designed with our brain chemistry in mind to make it addictive. Like anything in life, it’s important to have boundaries around it. Nothing can be a free-for-all.
