Social media is changing how we relate
Unpacking the deeper aspects of mobile internet and social media use that create a culture of catastrophe and fuel the crisis of connection.
There is a lot of buzz in the news recently (here, here, here, and here) about social media and its adverse effects on adolescent mental health. I join the many doctors, researchers, therapists, and parents who share these concerns. As a therapist who works with young people and their families, I see evidence of the harmful effects of technology on kids everyday. There is no young person I’m talking to that doesn’t mention social media or the internet as a point of stress.
My personal theory is that it is not just the length of time that kids are using their phones and social media, but rather how they are using them.
So, it is my hypothesis that the rise in adolescent distress is not just the result of kids being exposed to too much screen time, but due to an overexposure of specific types of content and algorithms that they are not developmentally ready to process and do not (yet) have the skillsets to manage the distress they cause. I will explain more about this below.
Through my clinical work with kids, young adults, and parents in Toronto, Canada, I have been exposed to a range of cases that substantiate or give rise to my concerns. I do not believe this is geographically specific and I am starting to believe that social media and mobile internet use is not just harmful for kids. It impacts all of us. Though kids use certain apps more than adults, I do think that adults are impacted by these patterns too. Kids just have less practice hiding it or shoving it down.
Mobile internet and social media overuse is changing how we all relate.
Mobile internet, 5G, and wi-fi enabled the development of smartphone apps and features that fundamentally changed how we connect. The addition of the front-facing camera, the “Like” button, the News Feed, location-based data sharing, and the ever-changing algorithms allowed us to simulate the look and feel of social interaction without the deeper forms of social connection. That is, the very architecture and design of these apps make it feel like we are connecting more deeply than we actually are.
The architecture of social media and entertainment apps are eerily similar to the design and function of the human body. For example, news feeds and algorithms have similar features to that of the bloodstream, brain, and nervous system, which are constantly sending signals throughout the body to influence the organism’s performance and functioning. With each new input, the machine becomes wiser and better equipped to anticipate or initiate a required response. Yikes.
It is my belief that using mobile internet and social media at any age exploits our primitive instincts to make us more primal, making us less socially engaged; trains us to be more self-focused than other-focused; alters our system of beliefs by changing our sense perception of what is imagined, true, real, and hyperreal; and changes the authentic expression of our core emotions, which creates patterns of repeated stress activation, alarm, worry, anger, escape, and hypervigilance. Yikes again, if accurate.
In the following four sections, I’m going to outline some of the negative impacts of overuse I see every day as a therapist to Gen Z and their parents to explain how I think these apps, their features, and the companies that profit from our overuse change how we all relate to one another.
Highly activating content wires us up for protection rather than connection; stressful content keeps us hypervigilant and hyperaroused.
Highly activating content wires us up to defend; defend our position, our identity, our beliefs, our lifestyle choices, our opinions, etc. We are defending, debating, and arguing a lot, which increases our stress chemistry.
High opportunity for open and anonymous engagement via the comment section enables heated discussion, debate, and dissent, especially when there is too much difference.
High opportunity for open engagement via the comment section normalizes aggression; enragement gets engagement, which promotes impulsivity, risk-taking, the pursuit of a higher social status, and bad-faith dunking on one another.
The structure of the apps allow us to depersonalize the user on the other end; we can engage anonymously, without engaging many of our social senses, and without needing to be as accountable as we are in person.
These apps also exploit our primitive, pre-social instincts to pursue, attack, and dominate; we are constantly offering aggressive hot-takes, takedowns, and dogpiles. We also get piled on if we say something people disagree with. We are the hunters and the hunted.
Algorithms reward constant engagement, emulating a survival of the fittest model where the heaviest users are pushed highly engaging and trending content. They are rewarded with social currency in the form of likes and followers and are seen as popular or as part of the in-group. Social media could be unintentionally reinforcing or creating these hierarchies. Survival of the fittest becomes survival of the most followed.
The strength and pace of the algorithm pushes highly inflammatory content, even from those you do not follow directly. There is no true escape from being exposed to violent, hypersexualized, or mature themes.
Constant caption, story, and photo-sharing creates the conditions for competition and comparison, capitalizing off of our desire to fit in, belong, and not get kicked out; news feeds and algorithms push the content that gets engagement (extreme beauty, wealth, lifestyle, fitness, humour) and we keep scrolling to check how we measure up.
We have a primal desire to fit in, be part of the group, and not miss out. The 24 hour news feed reinforces and encourages our sharing of constant updates. For some, there is no break from broadcasting.
The 24 hour news feed and the 24 hour news cycle keep us socially and emotionally alert but socially and emotionally disengaged, leaving us pre-social in our relationships with others (poor, surface level communication).
The apps provide little social feedback due to its broadcasting and performance nature; there is no social feedback loop that keeps us socially motivated to connect or be with others in person. They are designed to keep you using them.
There is a loss of common humanity (though there is still some hope); touchpoints with others are generally driven by virtue signalling, fear, alarm, anger, threat of disaster, and danger signalling.
Social media trains a narcissistic level of self-focus; it encourages us to focus on our insecurities and how we are perceived by others; we take things more personally when we’re constantly shining the spotlight on ourselves.
Social media might be normalizing narcissism by the increased instances of Acquired Situational Narcissim, or the very least, our obsession and pursuit of fame and fortune. The likelihood of becoming rich, famous, and popular is more attainable and possible, which might be encouraging chronic self-focus.
Social media might encourage too much uniqueness and individuality than we need to relate and connect, which sets the expectation that we should all be working to individuate or become a fully differentiated and unique character.
We only see the highlight reels of others; social media may cause us to over-inflate the size of our own problems when we only see how great others are.
Social media encourages self-promotion and self-performance; many of us are broadcasting our lives rather than fully living them.
Social media rewards constant oversharing and forced vulnerability by promoting our most engaging, provocative, and vulnerable posts in the algorithm. Is that actually good for us?
People today are experiencing Main Character Syndrome, a situation where we incorrectly assume we are the center of the world and the world should be built in our likeness, on our terms, and to our standards; we may begin to treat others like Supporting Actors.
We might also be more likely to experience confirmation bias due to the fact that the algorithm only pushes what it thinks we want to see, so we only see information or seek out information that is already in line with what we believe.
We are experiencing high levels of loneliness, disconnection, and an overall decline in friendship. Constant self-focus creates a crisis of connection, where we are shifting our preset ability to be other-focused, empathetic, and community-based to chronic self-focus.
Being too self-focused is also decreasing our ability to be present with others; we become less mindful, over-focused on our phone, and check messages, notifications, and incoming information too often.
Being too self-focused might also be causing a social contagion effect in schools and beyond; kids are seeing other kids their age struggle; kids are staying up late scrolling their feeds; kids are being exposed to hypersexualized and violent content from all angles; and kids are building self-focus rather than building self-regulation and self-awareness.
Becoming self-focused (or losing our ability to remain other-focused) might also be the result of social overload; there is too much social feedback and not enough time, capacity, or necessity to integrate it; we are over-exposed to too many people.
In some cases, social media may reinforce avoidance, escapism, and numbing, leaving us less likely to reach out, connect, do prosocial acts, or even face our problems or real-world conflicts. It is becoming easier to live a stress-free existence online than it is to live a life in person.
In some cases, social media could be reducing our capacity for creativity, imagination, curiosity, spontaneity, and play; artificial intelligence, algorithms, and content generators reinforce the need for a creator economy rather than an economy of creation.
Social media might also be training us to spot problems rather than find solutions; we stay stuck in cycles of grievance rather than offering to help solve problems around us that impact us directly.
We become hyper-aware of the real or potential dangers, problems, and threats around us, distorting our view of ourselves, others, and the world; things can still be bad while things are currently better than they’ve ever been.
We might be overestimating the size of the problems around us and underestimating our ability to handle them. Social media might be lowering our ability to tolerate acute stress, lowering our resilience, and increasing our frustration tolerance due to a lack of practice facing select challenges.
Social media is teaching us to awfulize, catastrophize, and rehearse distress more than we need to; algorithms, like buttons, comments sections, and viral content make the problems seem more important because they get more attention and engagement.
This might lead to cycles of worry, rumination, and overthinking as we seek to understand the size of the threats, problems, and dangers; we might be more prone to either/or thinking instead of noticing nuance and the grey area.
Social media is used as a tool for escapism and dissociation; we numb, escape, and detach from our bodies; some people enter into other realities and realms through an imaginative practice called reality shifting.
We might be losing our ability to discern what content, news, and information is real and what is fabricated by algorithms or artificial intelligence; we might be having a hard time distinguishing fact from fiction and reality from imagination.
When there is less friction on the apps, otherwise known as less in-app choices, we become stuck or stressed making simple decisions; social media might be changing how we make decisions by trying to make life frictionless and automated.
There is an endless feed with no bottom, which keeps us operating from the disinhibited, primitive, lower parts of our brain rather than from the prefrontal cortex. We lose the ability to discern, action outcomes, and pay attention.
Social media might also cause us to lie or embellish the truth; we may fabricate a version of events or lie about our situation for personal gain.
Algorithms distort our reality by creating silos of disconnection from other viewpoints or lived experiences. We lose our exposure to diversity of ideas, life experience, and cultural background.
Algorithms and specific styles of content creation might also be creating thought contagion, where we learn what to think instead of how to think. We only listen to the loud voices rather than the ones with expertise.
We lose the art of expertise when everyone becomes an expert; people start to claim expertise by stating an opinion rather than being well-researched.
Social media might also be training us to omit certain perspectives and discount well-researched, scientific evidence; we might also be trained to prefer the soundbite rather than the in-depth analysis.
Social media might also cause a distortion in what it means to be a complex human; there is no such thing as perfection.
The stress from social media and internet overuse might be causing us to misinterpret or misunderstand the messaging of our own emotions while using these apps (and perhaps even when not using them).
The stress from social media might also be causing a widespread anticipation of fear; when fear is met with stress, it creates patterns of panic.
Social media might be making it hard for us to discern the difference between everyday emotions, general stress, distress, overwhelm, and trauma.
Social media, or perhaps the stress of being constantly plugged into the digital social grid, might also be causing kids to hurt themselves or think about suicide, evidenced by a rise in emergency room visits, suicide attempts, and incidences of self harm and eating disorders.
Social media might be causing excess anxiety, doom, and dread.
Social media might be making us more prone to judgment and criticism, especially towards those who are too similar or too different from us; constant downward comparison could be making us more depressed.
Notifications and constant flickering ignites our startle response and lowers our threshold for coping, which increases the stress load.
Social media could also be contributing to the low-level rage, resentment, and frustration we feel if social media has become the only social arena through which we process our anger.
Social media also contributes to shame for not measuring up and not being good enough; not rich enough, smart enough, hot enough, happy enough.
Social media might also be reducing our ability to notice good things happening around us if we’ve been trained to spot danger, notice problems, and work our stress out on others via the internet.
Oversharing online might also be producing the illusion of authentic sharing and instead be reinforcing the belief that we need to excavate our deepest traumas or childhood wounds in order to connect or be in relationship.
Finally, social media might be keeping us stuck in a stress loop, where we have no realistic or practical way of hopping off of it; staying in the loop is more appealing than hopping off the stress loop.
Sadly, the conversation around social media these days seems to be a lot of doom and gloom. I do want to reinforce my position, which I’ve said in other places, that I think social media and the internet have so much potential. I believe strongly in our humanity; our ability to connect, to share resources, to choose kindness, and to provide an active contribution to the wellbeing of others.
I think social media litigation will be the next tobacco litigation. That may be the only way we see changes that will benefit all of us, and especially the young people who are disproportionately impacted when they use these apps. There is already evidence of it happening (for example, here and here) and some apps are already making changes (well, kind of). I think a wave of changes are coming, which I hope will address the concerns I’m reporting or identifying here.
Until then, I appreciate your continued comments and feedback as I sort through my hypothesis that social media is changing how we all relate, not just causing the adolescent mental health crisis.
Be well,
Jake
What an insightful article! Thank you. Gives us all a lot of food for thought.
Jake--this is SO important! Everyone needs to know this! My kids and I are AuDHD with other health issues, so they do homeschool and I work from home. Like many disabled people, we really heavily on social media for social interaction. My kids, though, were fortunate to have a middle school class on research methods that at least taught them how to judge the reliability of media--but this class was only offered to the gifted kids, when it is ALL kids who need it. But what you're saying here about the effects of algorithms on our nervous system itself goes even deeper than that! Kids need to learn mindfulness, to feel when their emotions are being triggered, and to learn to switch tasks. This is extremely difficult for neurodivergent people, because we get sucked into hyperfocus. But so necessary, too. Thank you.