Our Social Media Addiction

I was in high school when Facebook took off. This was in the mid-2000s, when the platform had a “wall” for public conversations, and you’d often post an uncurated album of 75 photos from a day out with your friends.

As an introverted, socially awkward teenager whose in-person interactions never seemed to go right, I liked the way Facebook allowed me to portray myself as I wanted. I created a profile that showcased my favorite quotes from classic movies and the music I had on repeat. In the digital world, I was more open and candid. I got to know people that I wouldn’t talk to face-to-face—and I often used the platform to vent about my classes.

My social media use seemed harmless. But I soon noticed that my attention span and mental capacity were suffering. When trying to finish school assignments, I’d check Facebook repeatedly. Each day I spent hours scrolling through its pages. It got so bad that I had to temporarily deactivate my profile ahead of my final exams to eliminate temptation.

But after they ended I was back at it. I remember how, during a weeklong trip I took with my family that summer, we had no computer access (this was before smartphones), and I kept thinking, I can’t wait to get home to check Facebook. I’ll have more notifications since I’ve been away. Most notifications I got were surface-level comments or passive “likes” that didn’t really mean anything, yet it was so hard to stop checking them.

I knew that I should have been reading a book—or pursuing some enriching hobby—instead. I blamed myself, thinking, This is how I’ve chosen to spend my time. But I later learned that social media platforms are addictive by design: The notifications they’re built around trigger a dopamine release in our brains, just as recreational drugs and gambling do. My Facebook addiction wasn’t my fault.

As the New York Times reporter Max Fisher explains in his new book, The Chaos Machine, “Dopamine creates a positive association with whatever behaviors prompted its release, training you to repeat them….When that dopamine reward system gets hijacked, it can compel you to repeat self-destructive behaviors. To place one more bet, binge on alcohol—or spend hours on apps even when they make you unhappy.”

Fisher says that the notifications themselves aren’t the problem. But they become one when social media platforms pair them with positive affirmation—those likes, follows, updates from friends, and photographs of family, pets, food, and beautiful scenery.

In another new book, Digital Madness, the psychologist Nicholas Kardaras explains that the people behind Facebook and Instagram not only designed their platforms to be wildly addictive but have kept them that way even amid mounting evidence that social media overuse has a horrible effect on people’s mental and physical well-being. (The same is true for Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and most other social media.)

One study that Kardaras cites found that university students who used social media for more than three hours each school day suffered from poor sleep and poor academic performance. They also had much higher rates of depression, substance abuse, stress, and suicide. Why? One likely culprit is too much false social comparison: In online posts, photos, and videos, the grass always seems greener elsewhere.

“Imagine,” Kardaras writes, “someone recently divorced and alone staring at their Facebook news feed and seeing a never-ending stream of one happy family vacation photo after another from all their friends?…We can see how the effect can exacerbate the feelings of emptiness and despair—of my life is a failure.”

And children and teenagers (like high-school-era Kelsey) are uniquely vulnerable to getting hooked and suffering the consequences. In Influenced, Brian Boxer Wachler, a doctor who somewhat ironically gained his fame on TikTok and other social media platforms, digs into this issue. In fact, he coined the term “dopamine behavior balance,” or “DBB,” to refer to the level of dopamine stimulation in those seeking out the activities that provide it.

Boxer Wachler contends that young people have become accustomed to turning to social media to maintain their DBB—and it’s reflected in their brain activity. In a UCLA study, MRI scans measuring blood flow to the brains of teenagers responding to Instagram likes showed that their nucleus accumbens, or reward centers, lit up with activity. Another MRI study found that adolescents were more likely to give a thumbs-up to photos that already had many likes and that seeing such photos stimulated areas of the brain that were entirely different from the areas stimulated by less popular photos.

Like Kardaras, Boxer Wachler asks readers to extrapolate: “Imagine what occurs when young people—whose brains are still developing—are exposed to positive and negative social media influences for hours on end while typically unsupervised,” he writes. He notes that research has also revealed that multitasking with devices while doing homework and studying leads to lower gray-matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex, supporting evidence that using social media does indeed change the brain.

Boxer Wachler goes on to say that teenagers are more susceptible than adults are to the opinions of peers and influencers because their brains are still changing. They are more likely to feel “immediacy, connectedness, and intimacy” with the people they follow, including celebrities, and lack the critical thinking skills to recognize when they’re in an entirely one-sided relationship.

I did eventually manage to break my addiction to Facebook. These days it’s the last place I want to spend my free time—not just because its business is based on hooking people but also because it allowed bots to sow disinformation that unfairly influenced a pivotal presidential election.

At the same time, part of my day job is to oversee HBR’s presence on social media platforms. But our aim is to create safe communities for discourse and to share information that’s truly helpful to individuals and organizations. My hope is that others on these platforms—and the companies that created and maintain them—can work toward a future where they try to enrich rather than prey upon their users.

Copyright 2022 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.