Question: Many students – especially those in high school – think social media is addictive, destructive, and harms their mental health. However, teens still use social media and "waste" time for short dopamine online. What easy tips can students impose on themselves to limit their social media use and focus their time on assignments/work and activities beneficial to them (playing an instrument, playing sports, spending time with friends, etc.)?”

 

Answer: First, thank you for this question, which touches on a common concern. Before diving in, let’s first consider what we know about social media’s impact on mental health.  

Is social media addictive, destructive or harmful to mental health? 

Currently, there is no evidence to support the claim that social media is universally addictive, destructive, or harmful to the mental health of all adolescents. A systematic review of the research (essentially a review of many research reviews) on social media use and well-being shows that social media use is weakly associated with both poor health and well-being. This means that the amount of time that teens spend on social media plays a very small part in explaining adolescents’ well-being. Recent studies have also shown that the impact on well-being of different types of social media use (e.g., messaging privately, passively looking at messages without responding, and browsing public social media content) varies from person to person throughout adolescence.  

Addressing addiction, we know that the amount of time adolescents spend on social media does not determine whether they are “addicted” to social media. In fact, the duration of time spent on social media only explains 6% of problematic internet use. 

Feeling shame or having a primarily negative view of your social media use can be damaging to your well-being, be it through depression symptoms or unhealthy behaviors and/or decreased willingness to see health care services. For social media specifically, one study examined the impact of believing that social media is bad for you has on well-being. The study used server-logged Facebook data of 29,284 participants. For participants who believed Facebook was good for them and society, greater time spent on social media was not associated with well-being. However, for participants who believed that Facebook was bad for them and for society, greater time spent on social media was linked to lower well-being. In other words, it's not as simple as the number of minutes or hours people are on social media. One would also need to consider the bigger ideas and thoughts people have about the platforms they use.  

Social media and dopamine: Is there a connection? 

As far as social media use and dopamine, to our knowledge, there are no current studies that have examined the relationship between dopamine and social media use among adolescents. Early studies of liking behavior on social media reveal that high schoolers and college students showed higher activity in brain regions associated with reward when they received likes from unknown peers on their Instagram images as well as when they viewed others’ images with likes and provided likes to other peers’ photos on Instagram. Another study suggests that adolescents who check social media 15 or more times per day show different neural responses to anticipating reward or feedback compared to adolescents who do not check social media at all. However, these studies must be interpreted with caution because it is unknown whether neurological differences were present before the start of engaging in checking behaviors, for example.  

Is social media a “waste of time”? 

Addressing the “wasting time” aspect, we know that many teens use social media in positive ways including the social connection. For example:  

Hopefully these studies can help you think about different perspectives and experiences with social media.  

Tips for managing social media use: 

There are mixed findings about the effectiveness of limiting social media use; setting limits on use seems to be beneficial for some adolescents, but can be detrimental to others depending upon how they use social media.  

Here are some tips that students can use to reduce their social media use and concentrate more on assignments, work, and activities that are beneficial to them:  

  • To focus your time during homework, school or at bedtime, consider setting “do-not-disturb” or “focus mode” so you are in control of when devices grab your attention 
  • Develop a schedule that includes time for your offline hobbies and special interests. 
  • Plan a regular sleep routine that helps you relax and enjoy restful sleep 
  • Consider talking to your family about establishing a Family Media Plan that can provide ideas for rules, guidelines and shared media experiences across your family 
  • Explore the variety of control settings that social media platforms offer to understand how to curate your feed to the content that would be beneficial to you in this previous portal response on Managing Content on Social Media Feeds. 
  • Seek out media that you find valuable such as content that helps you learn, provides new perspectives, or connects you to others 

Find more helpful tips and strategies to practice healthy digital media use in this previous portal response on Screen Time for Teenagers. 

References 

  • Bates, A., Hobman, T., & Bell, B. T. (2020). “Let me do what I please with it... Don’t decide my identity for me”: LGBTQ+ youth experiences of social media in narrative identity development. Journal of Adolescent Research, 35(1), 51-83. 
  • Behm-Morawitz, E. (2020). Media Use and the Development of Racial and Ethnic Identities, in The International Encyclopedia of Media Psychology, J. Van den Bulck, Editor. Wiley Balackwell. 
  • Beyens, I., Pouwels, J. L., van Driel, I. I., Keijsers, L., & Valkenburg, P. M. (2021). Social Media Use and Adolescents’ Well-Being: Developing a Typology of Person-Specific Effect Patterns. Communication Research. 
  • Coyne, S. M., Weinstein, E., Sheppard, J. A., James, S., Gale, M., Van Alfen, M., ... & Banks, K. (2023). Analysis of social media use, mental health, and gender identity among US youths. JAMA Network Open, 6(7), e2324389-e2324389. 
  • Davis, K. (2013). Young people’s digital lives: The impact of interpersonal relationships and digital media use on adolescents’ sense of identity. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(6), 2281-2293. 
  • Ernala, S. K., Burke, M., Leavitt, A., & Ellison, N. B. (2022, April). Mindsets matter: How beliefs about Facebook moderate the association between time spent and well-being. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-13). 
  • Hunt, M., All, K., Burns, B., & Li, K. (2021). Too much of a good thing: Who we follow, what we do, and how much time we spend on social media affects well-being. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 40(1), 46-68. 
  • Kim, S., Thibodeau, R., & Jorgensen, R. S. (2011). Shame, guilt, and depressive symptoms: a meta-analytic review. Psychological bulletin, 137(1), 68. 
  • Maza, M. T., Fox, K. A., Kwon, S. J., Flannery, J. E., Lindquist, K. A., Prinstein, M. J., & Telzer, E. H. (2023). Association of habitual checking behaviors on social media with longitudinal functional brain development. JAMA pediatrics, 177(2), 160-167. 
  • McInroy, L. B., & Craig, S. L. (2020). “It’s like a safe haven fantasy world”: Online fandom communities and the identity development activities of sexual and gender minority youth. Psychology of Popular Media, 9(2), 236. 
  • Odgers, C.L. (2018). Smartphones are bad for some adolescents, not all. Nature, 554, 432-434.  
  • Pont, S. J., Puhl, R., Cook, S. R., & Slusser, W. (2017). Stigma experienced by children and adolescents with obesity. Pediatrics, 140(6). 
  • Sherman, L. E., Hernandez, L. M., Greenfield, P. M., & Dapretto, M. (2018). What the brain ‘Likes’: neural correlates of providing feedback on social media. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 13(7), 699-707. 
  • Sherman, L. E., Payton, A. A., Hernandez, L. M., Greenfield, P. M., & Dapretto, M. (2016). The power of the like in adolescence: Effects of peer influence on neural and behavioral responses to social media. Psychological science, 27(7), 1027-1035. 
  • Valkenburg, P. M., Meier, A., & Beyens, I. (2022). Social media use and its impact on adolescent mental health: An umbrella review of the evidence. Current opinion in psychology, 44, 58-68. 
  • Van den Eijnden, R. J., Lemmens, J. S., & Valkenburg, P. M. (2016). The social media disorder scale. Computers in human behavior, 61, 478-487. 
  • Yau, J. C., & Reich, S. M. (2018). Are the qualities of adolescents’ offline friendships present in digital interactions?. Adolescent Research Review, 3, 339-355. 
  • Yau, J. C., Reich, S. M., & Lee, T. Y. (2021). Coping with stress through texting: an experimental study. Journal of Adolescent Health, 68(3), 565-571. 

 

 

Age: 13-18 

Topics: Middle adolescence, late adolescence, high school students, social media addiction, mental health, dopamine, waste time, limit social media, focus 

Role: Teen