Social media and the teenage brain
"Teens on screens" (Jojo Bailie, The Puma Prensa)
Written By: Jojo Bailie, Staff Writter
Most days when I come home from school, I'm tired. I learned for seven hours, so I can do my homework at a later time. Although being on my phone doesn't lessen the stimulus I had experienced all day, it takes my mind off what's going on in my life. As I continued to procrastinate on my work, my dad would walk into my room and tell me his favorite line: “Your brain is turning into jello.” He wasn’t entirely true, but that doesn’t make it any less weird to think about which begs the question: what is social media doing to my brain? To put it simply, it causes a number of bad things. Our phones have many beneficial qualities, but the addiction of social media has negatively impacted our brain development.
Our body goes through many changes from roughly ages 5 to 25. We have physical changes, but most importantly we go through adolescence, which is mental changes. Adolescence does contribute to puberty, causing imbalance hormones and body hair, but it’s mainly known for mental development. We have intellectual abilities that tell us what’s right from wrong, our conscience acting as the cricket to our pinocchio. Along with a growing conscience, our psychosocial development is also changing. This controls our impulsive behavior, maturity levels, resists peer pressure and helps us think long term.
Here’s what’s important:
There’s something called a Maturity Gap where teens at the age of 16 are as smart at 20 year olds, but have the mentality of a 10 year old
From Kindergarten to senior year of college, the very front of our brains are still developing. It’s responsible for regulating our psychosocial development like impulse control and setting routines and habits
Dopamine, a neurotransmitter, is what makes us feel happy. Anything considered exciting releases dopamine– like getting a text from someone you like, there’s a dopamine spike. During adolescence there is an unbalanced distribution of dopamine. This causes our highest highs and our lowest lows– so things that are great are awesome, and things that are boring are draining.
Back to the Gap, where our maturity and our intelligence are on different pages. Going into middle school, we were focused on student approval–most “I dare you’s” were followed through because our impulse control wasn’t fully developed. We were easily influenced, and arguably still are, but now there’s social media: the wants and needs of others, the cars, the houses, the makeup, and the standards. These social pressures make us envy others and even become sad. With dopamine still figuring out what's happening, our sadness can begin to feel like depression.
Studying to be a pediatric nurse, Maria Carillo student Maya Paris explains the constant comparison we experience on social media. Her observations lead her to believe that the more information we receive, the more we compare, which heavily imbalances the dopamine in our body. We already know what dopamine does, but with continuous spikes and drops of dopamine we earn by watching videos, it’s difficult for our brains to regulate this chemical imbalance. “It’s fast-paced communication,” Paris explains, “because when I think about it, you are only supposed to meet around 2,000 people in your lifetime–face to face– but with social media it could be hundreds of thousands.”
In an article by Levi Fishman, a researcher for Health Matters, writes “these platforms give adolescents the opportunity for increased social feedback.” There is such a thing as too much socializing– but with phones you don't even have to meet the person.
Over the past week I’ve been conducting a little experiment of my own and having interviewed 8 participants, I have come up with the following. On average:
Last month, participants were on social media often or for daily amounts of time (every other day to a couple hours a day), yet couldn’t confidently recall any of the media they viewed
Although participants sometimes post or comment on social media (from once a month to once a year), 100% of the participants felt good or happy to see another person react to their post or comment
Nursing student, Paris, explains social media has “Trained our brains to digest a lot of information but not exactly absorb it.”
I know I experience a little excitement when people online react to what I have to say, and this is exactly what Fishman is talking about. It’s this reward feedback we can't get enough of, this stimulus that makes us keep scrolling.
The apps on our phones are made to keep us hooked, perfectly timing when to give you a notification so you can stay on it longer. Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president of User Growth on Facebook, says “short term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.”
We now live in a six–second world, where a minute feels too long, but after turning off your phone the video you watched is now gone from your memory. But the point of watching these videos isn’t to remember them; it's to activate the dopamine in our heads, to keep us looking at more videos in hopes to have another spike of happiness.
MCHS Senior Dalila Campos elaborates on her experience with videos and media. “Chances are whatever I’m doing won’t get done nearly as well as it can be, because I’m being partially distracted even though I put it on to help me.”
“There’s a lot of ways you can set boundaries,” says Senior Audrey Marentez. “but it's just your willingness to set them, whether or not you wanna let those distractions become distractions.”
Because of social media and the way the videos are formatted, we are also starting to lose our memory. Most videos are roughly 30 seconds long, and 9 out of 10 times they aren't worth remembering, because they were made to only stimulate your brain. Because your brain just filters out these short videos, it also ends up forgetting what important things you need to remember. Constantly forgetting where you placed something, forgetting an assignment even though a reminder told you to work on it. Our brains just tune out everything because we are so used to getting information– a six second memory, the memory of a goldfish.
MCHS Junior Violetta Anadea explains the addiction of social media. To put it simply, she illustrates our need for validation like a “moth to a flame.”
“With the fire analogy: you touch it ‘ow it’s hot!’ and you’re not going to touch it because it hurts.” She illustrates, “But in this case it’s more like– you touch it ‘it feels good, but I see my hand burning and I can see that it’s getting physically injured, but it feels good so I'm going to keep going towards it’.”
Now let's be realistic, the chances of fully getting rid of our phones is highly unlikely. There are many things a phone can give us that benefit our lives every day. Setting a screen time or simply closing your phone doesn’t always work. Like most addictions, it can be very difficult to break habits. Students advise you to leave your phone in a separate room so you aren’t indulged in reaching for it. My advice is to find what works for you and look outside of your screen. If limiting screen time benefits you, do that, but the most important step is always the first. Don’t be a goldfish.
Like Anadea says “Social media; it feels good but it's horrible for us, and that's why we keep going towards it, even though it’s still burning us.”