Change Your Brain Every Day - Is Social Media to Blame for Teens’ Depression?

Episode Date: April 11, 2018

A recent study revealed that children who begin social media at age 10 are more likely to suffer from depression by the time they turn 15. So what exactly is it about social media that causes this depression? In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen describe what the effects social media has on a child’s psyche.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. And stay tuned for a special code for a discount to Amen Clinics for a full evaluation, as well as any of our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. Welcome back. Today, we're going to talk about a topic that is just making parents crazy and that is social media and children and there's a new study that links increased time spent on social media by 10 year old girls to a decline in their well-being by the age of 15. So I'm just curious, what social media are 10-year-old girls spending a lot of time on?

You know, I think parents more and more are giving kids cell phones and iPads, and they're not doing a good job of putting parental controls on them. I just talked to parents of a 14-year-old boy, and he and all of his friends were talking about porn. Oh, no, no, no, no. That's no question. By the time Chloe was in junior high, seventh grade, all the boys had porn on their phones.

That was like all the boys that she knew were walking around, all the boys had porn on their phones. That was like all the boys that she knew had were walking around talking about porn and having stuff on their phones. It was extremely inappropriate. But at 10, that's like two years before they get to, to junior high. Um, I admit I had a phone for my daughter probably before most people have give their kids phones for safety reasons, But there was no social media. I'm confused why a 10-year-old would be on social media. Am I delusional on this? Do most kids... Facebook has a new app for children.

And they say they have appropriate controls. But Facebook is like McDonald's. What are they doing on social media? Well, what they're doing is... That means they're socializing them to social media. They're going after your kids. The social media companies are going after your kids. And what is the purpose of that?

So that they create lifelong consumers, if you will. I mean, what's the point of a Happy Meal? I mean, there's nothing happy about the Happy Meal. They're bribing kids to eat bad food with toys and with marketing directed at them. I guess I just don't get it. I don't get why. But the more time children and adults,

the more time they spend on social media. And I've been thinking recently about, so why does it decrease your sense of well-being? And a long time ago, I thought about self-esteem. Self-esteem is where you think you are compared to where other people are your age or in your environment. So if you are where you think your potential should be, you actually feel pretty good about yourself. But if you're way behind your peers, then you don't feel good about yourself. So self-esteem is sort of the difference between where you are and where you think you should be.

So to make it really simple, it's sort of how you compare yourself. How you compare yourself. Right. And so with Kim Kardashian and that whole thing. Don't get me started. compare yourself right and so with kim kardashian and that whole thing everybody thinks they have a perfect life and they have a lot of money and they can buy all these designer clothes and they go but look at me i'm not perfect i don't have the way neither are they that that billionaire children have. And so I'm not as good as other people.

I'm not as pretty. I'm not as thin. I'm not as whatever it is. And they start doing that. And then you take girls in general who are more vulnerable to depression and more vulnerable to hating how they look. One study, I don't know, it's a scientific study, I think it was in Glamour.

But 93% of girls hated how they looked. Which is sort of funny because, you know, we have this running joke at home. You will look in the mirror and notice everything that's wrong. I'm like, wow, I have a new wrinkle today or whatever. And then I look over and my husband, every morning, every morning, he's over in the mirror looking at himself. He's like, he's so cute. How do you keep your hands off of him?

I have no idea. I'm going to make your ringtone, me too. It's by Meghan Trainor. If you haven't heard that song, you have to hear it. It's hilarious. So, yes. But back to what we were saying. 10% of nine-year-old girls have tried to make themselves throw up.

It's because they think that they are, they don't like the way they look. They don't like their bodies. They think they're fat. So, this is an epidemic. So, if you have a child, less time on their phone, less time on social media is so important. Yeah. And that makes sense. If you are thinking about this study, I mean, this was done on young girls and young girls are probably the most vulnerable, but I don't care what age you are. I do social media as a business. And so I come at it from a different perspective of trying to

help people. I think if you're doing it from that perspective, it's a little bit different. You actually gain some sense of purpose from that. But even at that, mostly what's on social media are problems. They're people's problems. Or like you said, you're comparing yourself to someone who has more than you, which by the way, almost everything on there is Photoshopped. They've just did a thing on, Chloe was showing me on her Instagram, they busted all of these celebrities for their Photoshopped photos,

and you can tell they're Photoshopped because they look one way, but the background behind them was distorted because of the Photoshopping, it's hilarious. So even they don't look that perfect, and they don't like the way they look, right so even they don't look that perfect and they don't like the way they look right so they're not even that perfect but you're comparing yourself to images that are not even real so of course you're gonna have a problem and you're listening to other

people's problems all day so that's why i mean it totally makes sense to me why this is an issue and then if you look at it from a neuroscience perspective, the more time their face is buried in their phone, the less time they're actually having a discussion with their families. The less time they're outside in the sunshine, and so they're going to end up with vitamin D deficiency. Yeah. The less exercise they are getting and these companies actually use neuroscience tricks to hook your pleasure centers in my new book feel better fast and make it less it's coming out in november

i actually talk about the pleasure centers a lot and how important it is to protect them from this chronic squirt of dopamine. Right. So to like, oh, here, pay attention to me, pay attention to me, pay attention to me. Because over time, that actually wears out your pleasure centers. You need more and more. And makes you more likely to get depressed. Or become an addict. Or become an addict.

Right. So, and the other thing is, this is another issue with, uh, that I was talking to my daughter about with social media is that so much of her generation now, they don't know how to communicate with each other or be present. So my daughter brought this up to me. She said, if you watch my generation, they don't know how to be uncomfortable. They don't know how to feel awkward. If there's five seconds of awkwardness, they bury their face in their phone. It's their escape. If they don't know what to say, rather than trying to think of something to say or learning how to communicate and work through it,

they bury their face in their phone. So boys don't really know how to communicate with the girls at this age and vice versa because they're doing everything over social media. So when they come face to face, it's just really awkward. So then they go on their phones. It's just weird. It's a weirdness. It's really sad. You know, I noticed this maybe 10 years ago that patients, my teenage patients, would

come in to see me and their heads buried in their phone. And I'm like, no, you have to turn that thing off or we're not going to accomplish what we need to accomplish and you know we're going to be wasting your parents money I'm not okay with that and it was it was um we had to fuss with them uh because they were so glued so addictive um you know so we think the cell phone was this major innovation. And in many ways, it is. But it can also cause serious problems in your life. So be very careful with social media.

Get them in the sun. Get them exercising. It can make a radical positive difference in their lives. Use the code podcast10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or on our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to get a free signed copy of the Brain Warriors Way and the Brain Warriors Way cookbook we give away every month.