I’ll start by saying this topic may not be for everyone, but statistically speaking, it’s for most of us. Specifically, last month’s Harris Poll which showed roughly 80 percent of people have taken steps
to try and reduce their social media usage, and approximately 50 percent wish social media platforms had never been invented.
In 2023, I wrote about the Surgeon General’s warning, stating social media was directly linked to the mental health crisis of teens. In that report, the eye-popping estimate of 3.5 hours of daily screen time seemed to be a wake-up call for all of us to scale back on our daily usage. That number is now higher. New data published in September showed the average teen spends nearly 5 hours a day on social media sites, and, even more significantly, many wish they never got started with them and that social media was never created.
Some other quick stats from the poll: 60 percent of respondents spend 4 hours a day scrolling, 23 percent log 7 hours a day and 60 percent say social media has a negative impact on their lives. X (or Twitter, as many will always call it), Snapchat and TikTok are the top 3 on the ‘wish it was never invented list’ while simultaneously being a huge part of those millions of daily usage hours.
You don’t need to be an addiction specialist to conclude this data is a troubling indicator of a problematic pattern. A recreational pastime we started doing because we enjoyed it, over time, becomes something that burdens our lives and negatively affects our well-being. If you look at the big three compulsions that we often think about: gambling, drinking and drugs, most people who have struggled in those areas would have a similar origin story that ‘it was fun until it wasn’t.’ There’s a saying related to drinking that “first you hold the bottle, then the bottle holds you.” Substitute the word bottle for phone, and it fits the current situation for many people trapped in a cycle of repeating the same routine of daily social media hours that they no longer enjoy but find themselves still doing.
Let’s take the stigma-loaded term of ‘addiction’ out of the conversation and use the clinical term Problematic Social Media Use (PSMU). You’ll find the same ingredients are in the recipe for social media becoming a problem in our lives that you would find with substance abuse or gambling. For example:
Salience: preoccupation with using social media
Mood Modification: using social media to alleviate negative moods
Tolerance: requiring more social media over time to attain the same level of satisfaction/mood modification
Withdrawal: discomfort/distress/irritability/frustration while attempting to cease/reduce use
Relapse: failed attempts to reduce social media usage
Conflict/social impairment: Social media use interferes with and damages one’s social life, emotional well-being, educational attainment, career and/or other activities/needs
Those six criteria would generally be found on a checklist attempting to gauge the current impact of problematic and compulsive behaviors like alcohol, drugs and gambling, but notice how seamlessly social media fits into the same categories. It’s no surprise in the sense that addiction/use disorders are largely considered to be related to dopamine. The behavior is enjoyable when we first start to do it, and over time and use we need to do more of it to get the same initial effects. Our well-tuned machine of body and brain recognizes this external dopamine-generating source (drugs/alcohol/social media) and reduces the amount of dopamine it’s producing to maintain homeostasis (the optimal brain chemical balance). Essentially, we need to keep that external source of dopamine coming in to feel happy/normal, but we need to keep increasing the amount to get the same effect (our tolerance increases, so using the social media example 3.5 hours becomes 5 hours of daily use). The additional use and the fact that we become more preoccupied and focused on it negatively affects the other parts of our lives. This escalation process makes the whole experience much less enjoyable until we get to the point when we stop enjoying it entirely. But we keep doing it anyway because we’re hooked. (That’s the point where we wish the activity we are now mentally struggling with was never invented at all, as mentioned at the start of this.)
Here’s the encouraging news. History is not destiny; every day is a brand new page on which to write your life story. If you, like the millions people of all ages and backgrounds, identify as using
social media more than you would like to, and it’s taking more from your life than it’s adding, make a change today.
That said, hope is not a strategy. Coming up with a specific use reduction plan to scale back to your daily screen time goal is critical to achieving your goal of spending less time spent looking at your phone. For extra motivation, just imagine using all those weekly hours for things that will make you feel better instead of worse!
Our phones have digital well-being settings that allow us to set alerts and limits for individual apps. That’s a great starting point to establish a new maximum daily amount of time spent. As a reminder, the data is clear that the benefits of social media enjoyment are limited to less than an hour of use. Once we spend more than an hour, the negative effects begin, and they increase the more time we spend. Put simply, 75 percent of the current average daily hours spent on social media apps is bad for our mental health (specifically: stress, anxiety, depression, FOMO).
Set up Screen Time on iPhone – Apple Support
Use Digital Wellbeing features on your Galaxy phone or tablet – Samsung.com
Of course, there’s always the cold turkey approach of just deleting the apps. I know that is not a realistic option for most people, but if you think that’s the way for you to break free, more power to you! The bottom line is when you do what others won’t, you’ll get results others don’t. At the moment, phones have a grip on people instead of the other way around, but you do not have to be in that category. Nothing great in our lives is going to happen on a social media site, but plenty of amazing things can when you create more time and opportunity in your day to let it.
