Our Brains on Smartphones and Social Media |
The Chainsmokers’ latest song, "Sick Boy," sums it up in a line, How many likes is my life worth? Constant interruption, desire to be entertained twenty-four seven, and continued connectedness are taking a toll on our mental, physical, and emotional health.
There is now a wide body of evidence that points to the fact that heavy use of smartphones, the internet, and many social media platforms can have debilitating effects on our neural processing, cognitive performance, and behavior. On average, smartphone users check their phones close to 85 times a day and interact with their phone about five hours a day. Increasing evidence is pointing to the fact that our smartphones are not making us so smart after all and are leading us to more unhappiness.
Recently, Sean Parker, one of the developers of Facebook, admitted they designed the program to monopolize our time and attention as much as possible. Specifically exploiting the principles of psychology, Facebook triggers the social validation loop and activates an insecurity, where people are searching for continued validation and reward. When this happens, we fall into a pattern of the hedonic reward cycle, pleasure seeking, for social validation. Much like Pavlov’s dogs salivating at the sound of the dinner bell, we are conditioned to check our phone for our satiety of social approval, wondering........