Once you start swiping, you can’t stop. Anyone with social media knows the feeling of scrolling for what feels like hours, being trapped on their phone all for the short boost of dopamine and a distraction from the outside world.
Social media is an increasingly accessible entity for kids with access to phones or devices. This accessibility has been shown to have impacts on kids’ mental health and productivity as it serves as a major distraction in their endeavors, such as school and extracurricular activities.
According to Carlmont High School student Hayden Amurao, most kids use the same three apps: Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram.
According to Pew Research Center, over 55% of teens in the U.S. have at least one of these apps downloaded on their phone, with 67% of teens using TikTok.
These numbers continue to grow every day as more and more parents give in to their children’s pleas to fit in with everybody else. With numbers rising, social media is becoming an increasingly concerning topic for health professionals as they are linking social media to a variety of effects, both physical and mental.
The mental impact
According to Yale Medicine, mental health issues have been skyrocketing in teens over the past decade, and researchers are beginning to point their fingers at social media.
This is backed up by Rachel Yeater, a licensed therapist who specializes in helping kids and teens.
“There’s a lot of comparison and self-esteem stuff that comes up in social media. We’ve seen especially a spike in depression amongst teenage girls, also cyberbullying and a fear of missing out,” Yeater said.
According to Stanford Law, major depressive episodes in adolescents have increased from 8.7% to 11.3% and are continuing to climb.
Yale Medicine also shows that the effects during depressive episodes are heightened because the brain is still developing during adolescent age and is, therefore, more susceptible to these issues.
Not only is social media causing depression, according to Yale and Stanford, but it is also addictive.
“It’s something humans naturally seek; we seek dopamine, and social media is the sort of thing that feeds it to you in these tiny little doses over and over again,” Yeater said.
The reality is that social media is far too accessible for teens. According to a study done by Pew Research Center, over 95% of teens have access to a phone and social media.
This accessibility, combined with its addictive properties, brings up a variety of physical effects.
Distractions and priorities: the physical side
With social media’s addictive properties, it becomes a distracting entity in kids’ lives. It impacts the time they spend on other things that may be more important to them, like school and extracurriculars.
“I definitely scroll a lot when I shouldn’t be, maybe when I have extra time to do work or do something else that is productive,” Amurao said.
In general, teens across the U.S. agree with Amurao, with 36% of them saying they use social media throughout the day, according to Pew Research Center.
“Short-form content and social media is so addicting because of how easily accessible it is, with it being right on your phone and how it instantly can be your entertainment for a long period of time,” Amurao said.
This addiction extends beyond free time and can have a serious impact on in-class engagement.
“For the students that find themselves off task regularly, I do notice that they are not fully present in class, and often, their engagement with the material, and subsequently, their grade, does mirror that,” said Andrea Struve, a teacher at Carlmont High School.
Struve employs ways to fix these issues in class using phone pockets. Each student is assigned a pocket in which they put their phone before class so they are not tempted to use it.
“For the most part, students seem more present and focused on the task, team, or content in front of them when their phones are in their phone pockets,” Struve said.
Even with the phone pockets, however, students are still frequently off task by accessing social media and games on their computers.
“My class is a computer-heavy course with the expectation that students should be focused and engaged each period. Despite this expectation and the enforcement of phone pockets, some students still definitely get off task on their laptops,” Struve said.
In the end, kids and adults will all have to learn to mitigate their usage of social media in order to limit the effects that they will face, according to Yeater.
“My best solution would be to delete the app, but that’s not always an option, so people should try to set a certain time of day to use it or use it on a different device other than their phone so it’s less accessible and less tempting,” Yeater said.
