How Social Media is Changing Your Brain Without You Even Knowing

On average, an individual spends about 3-4 hours per day on their phone, and approximately two hours of their daily usage is spent on social media. Spending a few minutes on social media platforms after a tiring day or posting that perfect picture of yours that your friend clicked doesn’t seem very harmless. Until the “few minutes” turn into hours, until a supposedly innocent break after a tiring day turns into a black hole that steals precious hours you have before the day ends, and the picture you posted makes you impulsively reach for your phone to check the likes and comments every few minutes.

Even after you lock your phone and set it aside, it stays on your mind, in your thoughts, distracting you from your work and making your eyes linger on the blank screen, wondering about any new developments. You pick it back up, check for notifications, open stories, and scroll through reels; your work is completely unattended. Whenever you try to get back into your zone, your thoughts deceive you, making you reach for your phone again. There’s something comforting and alluring about the mindless, endless scrolling, a perfect combination of guilt and fun. 

The rapidly evolving technology has only made it easier for us to access social media, which means that our brain is constantly bombarded with high stimulation, our neurons firing back-to-back, our seemingly simple and innocent actions threatening to change our brain's neurological architecture in the long term. 

Social media provides us with endless stimulation—millions of posts, stories, reels, and other media rest at the tip of our fingers, and with a single flick of our hands, we can refresh the entire feed, filling up our screens with new content crafted just according to our tastes. 

While processing this steady stream of information, additional notifications, messages, and real-world responsibilities contend for our attention. This forces us to multitask and divide our attention, which doesn’t seem that bad in hindsight. But this reduces our ability to focus efficiently, reduces our sustained attention span, and makes it harder to ignore distractions. Studies have demonstrated that heavy social media users perform worse on cognitive tasks than moderate social media users. It has also been suggested that constant social media usage might shrink parts of our brain associated with concentration and attention.

Social media usage also has implications for our memory systems. It has the capacity to influence our memory formation and our ability to recall information and circumstances. The constant exposure to information may overload our cognitive resources, impairing our memory system abilities. 

Most importantly, social media functions in a manner that is similar to gambling or taking recreational drugs. Every minute spent triggers the release of dopamine, a chemical messenger that makes us happy, pleased, and motivated. It tends to peak in pursuit of rewards, and social media is the epitome of something that provides rewards we don’t even have to work hard for. Every like, share, or positive comment we receive on social media gives us a small dose of dopamine, creating pathways in our brain that will make us desire these likes or comments. This feeling can be incredibly addicting, primarily because of its simplicity, accessibility to technology, and seemingly innocent actions that seem harmless. We might start our descent into a deceptively shallow pit and only realize after we reach the depths of the darkness and when there’s no way out. We need to realize the long-term implications of these actions and start regulating ourselves before it's too late. Besides, putting the virtual world of social media aside and enjoying this wonderful world we’ve found ourselves in doesn’t seem too bad, does it? 

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