Change Your Brain Every Day - What is the Link Between Social Media & Depression? PT. 2 With Dr. Jennifer Farrell

Episode Date: May 22, 2018

There’s no question that social media has changed modern society for better or worse. Some say that social media makes us more connected, but is this really true? In this episode, Dr. Daniel Amen is joined by addiction specialist Dr. Jennifer Farrell for a discussion on the physical effects social media has on the brain.

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. I am here with Dr. Jennifer Farrell, who's board certified in psychiatry, addiction psychiatry, a diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. She attended Loma Linda University School of Medicine, which is where Tana went and got her

nursing degree. She's an award-winning researcher, international speaker, interested in the interface between cultural and spiritual factors and overall mental health. And today we're going to talk about something that is just so horrifying to me. It's everyone's favorite topic. It's everyone's favorite topic. It's everyone's new favorite. It's the addiction of the decade, if you will, which is Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. Twitter and all social media. It's social media that has really stolen our minds. According to a study from Microsoft, this is 2015, the human attention span is now eight seconds.

A goldfish is nine seconds. So I say this is evolution going the wrong way. Well, I have a feeling it's not going to be too much more time before we actually have to reassess how we diagnose attention issues because there is such a huge difference between these fast-paced video games and this online scrolling through and news and everything on an instant and going and sitting in a classroom. People get bored. They can't pay attention. And is it actually, you know, ADD, the classic ADD?

Or are people now so used to having so much information at such a fast pace that they can no longer pay attention? And the world has changed, certainly since I grew up, since you grew up. You know when we were kids there was not the constant bombardment. I remember when video games came into my house. My son was 11, and he'd gotten straight A's in sixth grade and began to fall apart in seventh grade. And we started fighting. I think it was an Atari video game. We started fighting about it.

And so I just took it out of the house. I could just see the writing on the wall, this is a bad thing. And he's like, where'd it go? I said, oh, it's not working anymore. He said, well, aren't you going to get it fixed? I'm like, no, it's not good for you. Let's go play basketball. So let's talk about the biology of this. So I've been thinking a lot about it, that deep in your brain, you have structures that produce a neurotransmitter called dopamine. So it's in this area by your brain stem called the ventral tegmental area. It goes and pushes on the pleasure centers of the brain called the nucleus accumbens,

part of the basal ganglia. And so dopamine is produced, it pushes on the pleasure center, and if it's released too much, too often, the pleasure centers actually begin to wear out. And so people who are obese, they actually have lower activity in their nucleus accumbens because all of the low quality but tasty food has worn out their pleasure centers. And so they have to do more and more to get the same result. It certainly happens with cocaine. It happens with methamphetamines. And they've actually found it happens with social media. When you're waiting for the next post, for the next fan, for the next email, the next text, it's like you get this dopamine drip, drip, drip, dump, drip, drip, drip, dump, and you begin to chase it. Does that make sense from an addiction standpoint?

Well, absolutely. And when we look at different types of reward, the patterns of reward behaviors have been studied. And there's consistent reward, where every time you push a button, you get a pellet of food. And then there's inconsistent reward. And this is why gambling is such an issue. Because when you push a button and get a reward every time, people push a button and get the award.

When you push a button and don't get anything, push a button, don't get anything, push a button and then randomly get a lot of stuff, then you want to keep pushing that button. And people actually will push it more and more and more when they don't have consistent output or input. And so that's really how social media works. When you're on Facebook, well, is someone going to like something? And was I clever? Did they think it was funny? Did they like my picture? And a lot of times people are going on there to see their feedback. Are people retweeting what I said? Was I clever? And so they're looking to

get that, but it's not every time they log on. So they want to log on again and again and again and looking for that feedback. So it's creating an addiction. Do you think these companies actually hire neuroscientists to figure out how the brain works? You know, it's interesting. I wouldn't be surprised to know. I don't know the inner workings of them. Knowing what we know about the food company and our food industry and how often they brought in experts and they started putting sugar in everything, like every processed food product in a can, in a jar, you know, it's hard to find one without sugar.

And they did that because they knew how addicting sugar can be. And so the food industry learned it long ago, and I'm not surprised at all if the gaming industry, the social media industry does exactly the same thing. So I actually asked you knowing the answer to the question. Did I get it right? Absolutely. Hire neuroscientists. There's a book on this. It's called Hooked. And it's how to develop addictive products. And now we heard recently Facebook's going after your children. They developed an app for children. Oh, I did hear that. McDonald's and Ronald McDonald what is Ronald McDonald happy meal going after children yeah and you know we need the brain warriors way needs to go after them but in a healthy way is this good for my brain or bad for it so I recently had a 13 year old patient who took pictures of her body that she probably shouldn't have and shared it privately.

And that person she trusted shared it publicly. And my patient became suicidal, wanted to run away. I mean, it was just a nightmare. And I was actually in Washington, D.C. at the time, and Chloe, our 14-year-old, was with me. And I went, Chloe, how often does this happen? And I'm like thinking 5% of the time. She goes, 30% of the kids do that. And I was just horrified.

Yeah. I say to my friends all the time, like, thank God we didn't have Facebook when we were younger. Because we had a break. You know, we all went to school with the mean girls or, you know, all this stuff could happen between 8 a.m. and 3.30 p.m. And then you went home and you played with the kids on your street and did your homework and everything. And the teasing could stop. You could have a break from that.

And there wasn't this kind of idea of long lasting ramifications. There could be gossip, but there certainly weren't photos. And so we, you know, talk all the time about how grateful we are that we didn't have that. I can't imagine the pressures that kids have growing up right now with all the Instagram, not only of what to post, who's looking at it, but in a sense, it tells them how to look. And so they're really caught up in body image and the feedback that they're getting. And so, I mean, it's really something that this generation is looking at that I think older generations didn't have to deal with at the same rate and constant input with that. So thinking about it from an addictionologist's

perspective, what is the best way for parents to deal with gadgets for their kids? And we didn't talk about it yet, but pornography is also a huge issue. And I mean, it's just horrifying to me. I have another 14-year-old patient, and it's in his room for hours at a time talking to his friends about the porn they're watching on their phones, which is shrinking his brain, right? I mean, it's dumping dopamine repeatedly, so it's going to take more and more. So you imagine it's going to really damage his intimate relationships. Absolutely. And the parents were sort of beside themselves. Yeah. Well, I mean, two words, right? Parental locks.

I mean, you can call a phone company. You can call your cable company. You can block these sites. And it's something that even parents who aren't talking to their kids about it yet, your kids getting 12, 13, 14, it's a good idea just to go ahead and do it. Because kids, even before they have sex education in school or around that time, they're not going to come to you as the parent and be like, oh, I have these questions. Right. How many of us would have gone to our mom and dad and say, hey, this is happening. What do you think? Never. And so to have those in place. My mom had seven children and whenever I'd bring

it up, she'd turn green. And I would like, I know you know about it. Yeah. So limiting access is key. Having the conversations with kids about sexuality and healthy sexuality and how damaging pornography can be. So pornography isn't really learning about sex ed. There's a big difference there. So a lot of times people just say, well, I don't want my kids learning about sex. They're too young. Well, they're learning about it.

So you want to teach them healthy sex ed. So yeah, the pornography is a huge issue with phones and iPads and the computers. It's everywhere. Okay. So parental supervision is so important. I often say you have to be your child's frontal lobes until they're developed. Exactly. And the same holds true. And they don't develop fully until they're 25, right? So supervision, which is why I'm also sort of not a fan of sending 18-year-olds away, a long ways away to school,

because as you and I both see, that's often when the first major psychiatric crisis happens. It's the first suicide attempt, the first psychotic break, the first manic episode. It's when they're away and not being supervised, and often they've unleashed a trigger, a torrent of bad behaviors, you know, from food, not sleeping, crazy relationships and so on. Exactly. Well, these parental controls can also be so helpful on the social media sites,

on the Facebook, monitoring, not letting your kids who are too young be on Facebook, even talking to your kids of whether they should even be on it. There are some messaging devices that just delete texts after they're sent. So parents can't really monitor what their kids are sending because they automatically delete. It may not be the best idea for young kids. And how about for older people? I mean, I don't know if you've had sessions where you actually have to tell your patients to, you need to put down your phone. This is our time. You need to put down your phone. It baffles me that someone will come in

and pay money to sit in front of me, to discuss life with me, to hear what I have to say, and take a phone call, read an email, or text in the middle of that session, or check Facebook. Oh, just a minute. Excuse me? But it follows people. That's just a great example of how it follows people everywhere, adults included. So the addiction principles would be, the addiction treatment principles applied to social media would be what? So the first thing I would say, because a lot of people say they're not addicted. So you have to look at the social media use and say, is this a problem? Is this getting in the way with your sleep? Are you staying up later because you're on your phone or your iPad?

Is this getting in the way of work, your productivity, or relationships? So I used to have an assistant who's no longer here, who every time I'd come in to ask for help with something was on a dating app, swiping left and right. And I just said, excuse me, I'm over here. You know, I need this email sent, or can you fax this, or have you made this phone call yet? So it just kind of comes in everywhere.

So is it getting in the way with that? So that's one of the definitions of addiction. If you do something and it interferes with your life and your health, your relationships, your work, your money with the law, and you do it again, that's what we think of as an addiction. Exactly. That's when it becomes an addiction. Walk into a restaurant, look around you.

How many times have you seen entire families all looking down at their phones? They're not interacting. So when we say, is this getting in the way of socializing? Is your social media getting in the way of you actually being social? It shifts people from this world of reality into this world of fantasy, where we just kind of are biding time in real life just waiting to get back to this sense of um false sense of community online i have so many patients who come in to see me and i ask them well do you have friends are you social they say of course i have friends well they only have friends online. Right. Brand new study just out yesterday. The more time you spend online, the higher you are as far as depressed, anxious, and lonely.

Isn't that interesting? And there's other studies that show it's also associated with obesity. So you have to be careful. Yes. And limit times. Put limits on things. Only use your social media at a certain time. And put the phone away. I wanted to yell at my friend the other night. I had this fabulous dinner party. I made the table. I was cooking with friends. I mean, I went all out. And this guy's checking his phone all night. And I wanted to say, be here now. Like, don't post what you're doing. Like, just be here with us. You know, making, really limiting that time. And if you can't limit that time, you need to talk to someone

about it. That's an addiction. Be careful. Social media may not be, is not your friend. Stay with us. 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. Thank you.