Addiction to social media is becoming more prominent in users of social media platforms, and the people of Long Beach are no exception. Along with the habit of using social media, many consequences follow.
It is evident “phone addiction” occurs everyday in our lives. Usually, this is the case of spending too much time browsing on social media. Using social media has become a norm for many people, which can lead to overuse.
LBCC professor of Human Services Addiction Studies, Annahita Mahdavi, said there’s a more official word used in the professional field.
“Using the word phone addiction is wrong. The clinicians in America use a diagnostic criteria, DSM5,” Mahdavi said.
Mahdavi said that there is no official term for addictions relating to social media usage, but addiction through constant usage of social media is a real existing problem in this digital age.
“There are possibilities of people [possibly] becoming or developing the same kinds of behavioral disorders when it comes to social media. We have a generation that has no connection to pre-internet,” said Mahdavi.
“We know that social media does affect people in so many ways. We know that in the age of ‘liking,’ you know, we know people get stressed if there is not enough ‘likes.’ There is something called withdrawal, which means they have all these stressful symptoms, irritability, anxious. They also included tolerance, which means they feel they need to increase the amount of time that they play,” she said.
All of these components add to more compulsive tendencies to spend more time on social media.
“It becomes a disorder when people get affected in their functioning. Whenever people’s functioning are impacted in life, then we allow ourselves to look at it as diagnostic assessments. If it becomes a compulsive and impulsive behavior, in which you cannot get away from social media, that you’re constantly looking at how many likes you have, and now you’re stalking and now you’re finding yourself spending three hours when you have a final two days from now, that becomes a matter of concern,” said Mahdavi.
“I’m sure ten years from now, we will have a great pile of evidence-based research on how social media has been impacting lives as well, just like gaming disorders, or other disorders,” she said.
It is safe to assume too much usage of time spent on social media platforms is a form of addiction. But you might be wondering, “What’s the big deal with being addicted anyway?”
Addiction can be harmful, especially to one’s mental health and stability, ass proven by LBCC professor of psychology, Kyran Barr, who explained how addiction is harmful and problematic.
“Addiction is harmful to one’s mental health because it usually happens when we want to stop and you know it’s harmful but you can’t stop, whether we are physically addicted or psychologically addicted, despite the numerous negative effects,” Barr said.
“You might have problems in your personal life, in your occupational functioning, work. Or if you are in school, you might have difficulty with school. You can’t stop. You’re psychologically addicted, all of that adds to your anxiety, it adds to your depression(s), it takes a major toll on mental health.”
Barr also added that an individual can attain addiction through genetic predisposition.
“There’s a strong biological component,” said Barr. “You can be biologically predisposed. Addiction runs in families, that’s been pretty well documented. You know, in some cases you might say, ‘Well if it runs in families, it could be possible that you’re learning that behavior from an adult’ or something like that.”
“But even in family studies where a child is going to be adopted out, they’ve done a lot of studies with alcoholism, and what they’ll do is they’ll look at the alcoholism of the biological father and the alcoholism of adoptive parents. Sons of alcoholic fathers, even when they’re raised in non-alcoholic environments, tend to mirror the rate of alcoholism of the biological father rather than the adoptive. So what that tells us is there’s a strong genetic component to that. Because even if you remove the child from a family that has substance issues, and raise them in a family that has no substance issues, [the child] still tends to develop these issues more than the general population.”
To figure out why addiction is so rampant, it is better to look at the core of the problem: the scientific breakdown of how one becomes addicted. Addiction is found mostly in still-developing brains, which comprises of anyone below 25 years of age.
“There’s also the learned behavior as well. So, when a child sees adults doing it and having fun, then they might want to model that behavior; there’s all the psychological reinforcing properties. So you might not have a biological predisposition and still become addicted,” explained Barr.
Barr said,“Psychologically, many times someone becomes addicted, and this is a physical and biological and psychological phenomenon. What happens is, it in many cases activates the pleasure circuit in the brain. There’s this whole circuit that operates on the neurotransmitter, dopamine. And it stimulates an area of the brain, a structure called the nucleus accumbens, and the nucleus accumbens becomes active when you do anything that is perceived as pleasurable. And so what happens is, dopamine lights this brain structure up and it basically tells us, ‘Hey this is good, we should do this again.’ So there’s a biological mechanism at work and then along with that biological mechanism, you get all the associated pleasurable states. So the two kind of interact, and cause a biological and psychological addiction.”
Mahdavi simply called this, “mental preoccupation.”
“There is definitely a conclusion of this idea of constantly getting involved in activities that have instant gratification and pleasure and can impact the brain in wanting more of that – having less patience,” said Mahdavi.
In fact, scientific studies show dopamine is responsible for regulating people’s motivation.
Even without scientific inquiry, one can observe how spending long periods of time on social media can be distracting and hindering to one’s responsibilities or obligations.
Mahdavi reminded us that addiction to social media is still a very recent occurrence. “For now it is a need for further studies.”