An adolescent's brain changes fundamentally at the age of 10, this motivates them to seek out social rewards like attention and praise from their peers. This desires for increased peer interactions are caused by one of the first parts of their developing brains. This serves as a background to understand what occurs when social media comes into the picture.
- Every time we receive an approval, attention, or excitement though social media like, comment or share, dopamine - pleasure seeking hormone is released.
- This makes us want to check back for more every time we receive likes or comments.
- Which can alter the reward circuits in our brain and that's how we become addicted to social media.
The Infinite scrolling:
- Continuous scrolling nature on the social media apps deprive our brain of any cues to stop what we are doing.
- This makes it impossible for an individual to stop scrolling and lead us to go through the posts or videos continuously for hours on end without realizing it.
- As a result, the never-ending content feeds our brain's need for information.
How it affects the teenagers:
- Teenagers who check social media can become extremely sensitive to social praise and critical and emotionally rely on peers for approval.
- The capacity to sustain attention is already suffering with a rise in lack of attention or focus among the teenagers (pls note, this could also be due to other factors).
- As a result of this, this increases frequent attentional wandering.
- Social media can also lead to social comparisons with others, and it becomes detrimental to the teenager's self-esteem as they are still figuring out who they are and developing their self-identity.