Science Vs - Social Media: Is It Rotting Your Brain?

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

Social media. Many of us don’t feel very good when we’re on it, and yet we sometimes spend hours a day scrolling, eyeballs glued to our screens. Some experts say that social media is causing a mental health crisis, and governments are even talking about banning social media for kids. So what’s going on — can social media really shorten our attention span, hurt our body image or make us feel depressed? To find out, we talk to psychologists Professor Gloria Mark, Dr. Sophia Choukas-Bradley, Professor Silje Steinsbekk, and Dr. Rachel Hogg.  Resources to help with disordered eating: United States: National Eating Disorders: 800-931-2237 https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/get-help/     International resources and general mental health resources can be found here: https://resources.byspotify.com/  Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsSocialMedia  Gloria Mark’s book, Attention Span: https://gloriamark.com/, and Substack: https://gloriamark.substack.com/  Vote for the New Zealand Bird of the Year here: birdoftheyear.org.nz — we are supporting the tawaki piki toka! In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Our love/hate relationship with social media (06:36) Is social media ruining our attention spans? (14:04) Why is it so hard to stop looking at social media? (18:39) Is social media making us feel depressed? (25:56) Can social media affect your body image? (34:02) Tips for getting off social media. This episode was produced by Meryl Horn, with help from Wendy Zukerman, Rose Rimler, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, and Michelle Dang. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Sam Bair. Music written by Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, Bumi Hidaka and So Wylie. Thanks to the researchers we spoke to, including Professor Hunt Allcott, Dr. Jacqueline Nesi, Professor Patricia Conrad, Dr. Robert Kraut, Dr. Andrew Westbrook, and Dr. Niklas Ihssen. A big thanks to everyone who talked to us about social media in Washington Square Park! And thanks to Lori Segal, Ally Settelmayer and Whitney Potter. And extra thanks to Christopher Suter, Beverly, the Zukerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. Welcome back to a brand new season. We've got a lot of science, a lot of fun ahead. We're really excited to share it with you. So today we are pitting facts against having your phone stuck in your face as we tackle social media. And before we jump in, I just want to say that this episode does discuss disordered eating. It's a little bit later in the show. We're going to do a warning when it's about to happen, but please take care while you're listening and we're going to put some

resources in our show notes. Social media has become this huge bugbear. If you ask a lot of people these days about their social media use, you will hear a lot of complaints. When I scroll through Instagram, I feel horrible. I know it shouldn't matter, but I do worry about, okay, so why has this person's account gotten more followers than I did?

Why did I make a video in the same format, but theirs went viral and mine didn't? I feel like it's just so soul-sucking and it's like why are you letting yourself like fall into this? Well exactly because even though a lot of us don't seem to like being on these apps it's as if we can't look away. A Gallup poll from last year found that teens are spending almost five hours on social media every day, and even us grown-ups are getting sucked in. Senior producer Meryl Horne asked a bunch of folks at Washington Square Park in New York City this simple question.

So how often are you on social media? Oh, this will be a bad answer. Like two hours, three hours? How many hours a day do you feel like you're on it? Do you want me to check? Sure, yeah. Yesterday I was on Instagram for an hour and 48 minutes. The day before I was on Instagram for three hours and 18 minutes.

We all are just like so stunned by how it's taken over our lives. People were worried that social media had shortened their attention spans. Oh yeah, 100%. For sure. For sure. 1,000%. I don't have an attention span. I want to leave this, whatever this podcast is right now, because my attention span is so low. And that it was the reason that they found it so hard to finish a book or even have a conversation with a friend without wanting to check their phones.

This morning, you know, I'm like, what do I do? I read some of my Elon Musk you know, I'm like, what do I do? I read some of my Elon Musk book, and I'm just like, okay, like, I can only read so much of the Elon Musk book until your brain's like, okay, let's do something else. And it goes back to this dopamine hit in my iPhone. Last night, I was hanging out with these people in my dorm. For five minutes, we were speaking. For, like, 30 minutes, everyone was just on their phone.

Oh, my God, that f***ing kills me. I'm like, that's disgusting. That's disgusting. Like, talk, you're with people. And a lot of these complaints around social media have been TikTok-ing up for years. But it feels like recently, they've hit fever pitch. A best-selling book is claiming that social media

has created an entire generation of anxious and sad kids. Or at least I think it did. I couldn't really finish it. But it has been great fodder for the press, with headlines screaming that cell phones are killing our kids and that smartphones are a pocket full of poison. There's all these fears that it's tanking our mental health and giving us depression. The US Surgeon General says that he wants to put a warning label on social media for adolescents. Governments in the UK and Australia are now talking about banning social media for kids. So today on the show, we are going to find out, one, is social media really changing our brains and shortening our attention span? Two, why is it so hard to stay away from social media?

And three, is it responsible for tanking our mental health? When it comes to social media, a lot of us have been wondering, why are you letting yourself, like, fall into this? But then there's science. Science Versus is coming back just after the break. Don't look at your phone. Or try not to. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful, as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert, as trains can pass at any time on the tracks.

Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. How do stop losses work on Kraken? Let's say I have a birthday party on Wednesday night, but an important meeting Thursday morning. So sensible me pre-books a taxi for 10 p.m. with alerts. Voila! I won't be getting carried away and staying out till 2. That's stop loss orders on Kraken. An easy way to plan ahead. Go to kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Not investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. Welcome back. Today on the show, social media.

Is it scrambling our brains and screwing with our mental health? Meryl Horne, PhD, senior producer at Science Versus, has been looking into this. Hey, Meryl. Hi, Wendy. So, Meryl, what's your relationship like with social media? Oh, not great. Oh, really?

I actually thought you would be, I don't know, like bigger than social media? Oh, not great. Oh, really? I actually thought you would be, I don't know, like bigger than social media. Really? I'm glad I gave that impression because I just tend to use it a lot and then feel like shit afterwards. TikTok, I've had to delete at points because it's been so bad. It's not good. Oh. Yeah, I've had to like delete at points because it's been so bad. Like it's not good. Yeah, I've had like a rocky relationship with social media. Uh-huh. And so when I read the headlines that are like, you know, saying it's bad for our mental health, like that resonates with me. Yeah.

But I like wanted to see what the science says. So the first question I had was just like, what is it doing to our brains? And like right off the bat, I did find that using our phones can affect our brains in this kind of weird way. So in order to use your phone, what body part do you use? Oh, that's a strange way. I was like my, it feels like my hunched back is what I'm using.

But I guess like your thumbs. Yeah, yeah, your thumbs. Well, one study found that if you've been using your phone a lot recently, the like chunk of your brain that's devoted to like your thumbs actually gets a little bit bigger. No way. Right? Oh, that is weird. But to me, it's kind of just cool. It's like your brain realizing, oh, wow, she's really using her thumbs. Like, I better, like,

get more neurons doing that stuff. So there you go. Social media affecting our brain. Yeah. Of course it can, you know, like most things that we do. But then, like, the thing that I really wanted to look into that you hear a ton is that it's also affecting our attention span. Yes, that people can't even read a book anymore because of social media. Is this true? So I looked into that, and to help walk us through this is Gloria Mark. She's a chancellor's professor emerita at the University of California, Irvine. And Gloria is the perfect person to help answer this because she's been researching attention for decades. So how does she measure our attention span?

So what she's done is she'd go and just like watch people at their desk jobs. So people like administrative assistants or financial advisors, and she'll bring a stopwatch and just, like, watch them. You don't want to be too close. You don't want to be leaning over their shoulder. But it's close enough so you can get a sense of what's on the screen. Sometimes you see them picking up their phone. Sometimes you see them getting up and walking out of the office, and we try to follow after the person to the extent that we can.

Oh, my God. I mean, I'm just having this reaction because I'm just like, imagine, imagine how many cups of tea she saw me make, how many times they have to have a little bit more chocolate, how many times she'd see me pick my nose. But they know, right? Like if Gloria's in the corner, I will never look at my phone. Yeah.

No, she said that like when she first started doing this, people would act way differently. So they just like throw away the first few hours of data. Okay. But then like people kind of got used to her and then they just like had to keep doing their jobs. So then they just like kind of went about things as normal as far as she could tell. So she's been doing this for decades. And then did she see as smartphones came online how this was changing behavior? Yeah, that's what we're

going to answer. And by the way, more recently, she's been doing this with like computer software. Like she won't literally go to people's offices anymore with a stopwatch. She just has like computer software that tracks what they're doing. Oh, okay. So what's she found? So when we measured people using the stopwatch technique, we found that people average two and a half minutes on a screen before switching. And so now, you know, fast forward 20 years, and we find that it's averaging 47 seconds. 47 seconds.

Yes. So it shows that people switch their attention pretty frequently. Wow. So over just two decades, our attention span has gone down by two-thirds. That is insane. Yeah. And a few different researchers have measured this now using the same approach, and it's all hovered around this 47 seconds. Right. And we know that this has physical consequences on our bodies to be doing all this switching around. So Gloria measured people's heart rate variability to see, like, were people more stressed out

when they were switching around from, like, one thing to the next. We find that the faster the attention switching, the higher is the stress. And other research also finds that, that, like, going back and forth between different things stresses us out physically, can like raise our blood pressure and make our immune systems kind of get activated. Wow, that's really interesting. I think I can, I feel that. I mean, I wouldn't have thought about it in quite this way, but I think I do feel that, that once you're kind of on your phone and you can be like switching between, you know, you kind of check social media and you check your email and you check WhatsApp or whatever, and you can kind of feel that stress kind of kicking in. Yeah.

Okay, so this isn't just about not being able to watch some epic film without checking your phone. So do we know that social media is to blame here for shortening our attention spans? Well, technology has changed a ton in the past, like, 20 years, right? So, like, there's all these different apps now that are probably distracting us. But there is some research that says social media is partly to blame. To explain, like, why? Let me tell you about this thing that happens in your brain. So, like, let's say that you are trying to watch that like

epic movie. Part of you might be kind of thinking like, I'm just going to check my phone real quick. Like, I'm just going to do this. And it's like almost like a little impulsive devil on your shoulder being like, oh, you could just check this thing real quick. Yeah, exactly. But then maybe there's another part of you that's like, no, don't do that. It's movie time. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And it like resists that urge. And while it could be that when you're on social media, like you're not really exercising the part of your brain that's like showing restraint here. You're just like scrolling and scrolling. And it might be that it actually kind of like

weakens that part of your brain that's like, don't do that, like that kind of resists our impulses. The science-y name for this is inhibitory control. And scientists can like measure it in the lab. And one study looked at this in teenagers. And so they followed thousands of teenagers for a few years. And they found that if they were on social media more, they could see their inhibitory control get worse. Like they were basically more impulsive. Oh, could it be that people who are more impulsive just like tend to use social media more because that's kind of how their brain works

and it's not social media causing that? It could be that too. But in that study that I just told you about, they did see that like social media kind of came first. Like first people started using more social media and then they saw this, you know, drop in inhibitory control. So they thought that like maybe this is being caused by social media. And there are other studies too that support this kind of idea generally, like finding that people who spend more time on social media are also more easily distracted.

Mm-hmm. Okay. So is it permanent? Like, are we just stuck with our crappy attention span? I asked Gloria about that. Whenever I see your study quoted, it's kind of in this like context of like doom, like our attention span's only 47 seconds long. Like what have we come to?

Do you actually think it's that bad that it's gotten shorter? I, no, I don't. I do not think it's good that our attention spans have gotten shorter, but I am an optimist in that I believe that people, we can course correct. And the believe that people, we can course correct. And the reason she thinks that we can course correct is because she's seen it herself.

So like she had office workers go off email for a week and that worked to lengthen their attention span. She also tried this by blocking a bunch of websites that people said were distracting them, like a lot of social media, And people felt like it helps them to lengthen their attention span too. That's great. This is great news because I feel like so much of, I don't know, the doom, the doomy headlines. It really does feel like this is permanent. But if we could just put our phones away, we can retrain our brains. We can get our attention span back. But then I guess it leads to the question of why is it so hard for us to put our phones down? I guess specifically when it

comes to social media, like people will say like, oh, it's so easy to say put your phone down, but I can't. I just can't. Yeah. Why? Why is it so hard to put this down? Yeah. I talked about this with Sophia Chukas-Bradley. She's an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. And she also has another role. The clinical psychology lead at the Harvard Center for Digital Thriving.

Digital thriving. That's what we all want to be doing. Yes. The trick is how to do that. Neds. So I asked her about like why it's so hard to get off social media. And Sophia said that part of this does have to do with the fact that it like taps into this craving that we already have for social approval. So like in order to survive, humans have to get along with each other in groups. And so it feels good to our brains when we feel like we're getting along.

And scientists can see this in brain scan studies. Like when it feels like people like us, parts of our brains will light up like this thing called the reward system. And scientists have found that social media can also do this. So like they've put people into fMRI scanners when they're looking at like photos of social media. And they'll find that their brains do like light up more in these reward centers when they're like looking at one of their photos that has a lot of likes on it, which makes sense. If you know what it feels like to see that a post has gotten a lot of likes, it feels really exciting. But one problem is that like you kind of get sucked into it. So for me, what would happen is I would post something.

For example, my student got this award. I would get so excited by their response, by people tweeting it, retweeting it, liking it. I'm waiting in the checkout line. I'm walking from place to place. I'm checking. Is there another like? Is there a new comment? And it's reinforcing. If I check

and there is something new, it makes it much more likely I'm going to check again soon. And so, yeah, it kind of feeds into this thing where we end up staying on social media longer than we kind of mean to because we don't really know, like, when are we going to get that next comment? And in that sense, Sophia said that social media sort of ends up mimicking stuff like gambling. What makes slot machines so addictive is the intermittent rewards that are involved. So when someone is using a slot machine, most of the time they win nothing,

but every once in a while they win something. So yeah, researchers in the gambling world think that this is part of what makes gambling addictive. And while social media isn't officially considered addictive, like it's not in the DSM yet, which is used to diagnose people, it seems like social media might be doing something kind of similar, like a similar dance in our brains. It's really hard to stop scrolling or to stop checking or to stop posting because what if I scrolled one more time

and there was whatever it is I'm looking for? Something hilarious, something fascinating, something extreme and attention-grabbing. What if the next thing I post would get all the likes? What if the next thing I check would bring me whatever it is that makes my brain happy? I feel so sane. I feel so sane. Right? It's so relatable.

It's very relatable. Like, this is why I still look at Facebook at all, because I know it's not even that good. Like 99% of the time, it's just like crap. But every once in a while, they'll get me with like one thing, and then I end up spending way more time on it than I mean to okay okay so here is what we know we know that our attention spans have actually gotten shorter in the last two decades and we think social media is at least partly to blame for this but it's not permanent if only we could fight the powers of intermittent rewards. After the break, we are finding out

if social media is to blame for our mental health crisis. Yes, and then later I've got some tips for if you want to cut down on your social media. And it involves potatoes. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey, no, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations. You can now make the first move or not.

With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Welcome back. Today on the show, we're looking at social media. And a big thing is that social media is to blame for causing a mental health crisis. And so, Meryl, my first question is, is just like, why would social media, I know why it might make us feel like a little crappy, but why would it give us depression? Well, one idea that you hear a lot is that it's that social media makes you feel crappy because it's just like

taking time away from you that you would normally be spending doing other stuff that actually makes you happy, like hanging out with your friends. Uh-huh. And this came up a lot in the park in New York City. When I start a screen for too long, it literally kills me because it's like I need to be outside to be talking to people. But if I'm on a screen, I can't be doing that. If I'm spending a ton of time on social media, it means I'm not spending time doing things that actually are fulfilling. And it's not just these guys, like scientific experts are also saying that one of the reasons there is a mental health crisis right now in teenagers is because they're spending all their time inside on their phones, looking at social

media instead of like being out in the real world. So to find out if this is true. Oh, it's not necessarily true. No, it kind of makes sense that it would be doing this. But like, there's actually research that's looked at this. And so let's look at that. So the best study that I could find on this, it just came out a few months ago, was really intense. So they got a group of like 600 teenagers and they had been studying them for 15 years. So it started when they were like four and every couple of years they would bring them in to do this like battery of psychiatric tests. I love that we're still doing studies like this, by the way. I thought we stopped them in the 80s. No, still bringing in these kids. Great.

I talked to one of the researchers who did the study. They come to the university clinic. So we have huge psychiatric interviews. We interview their parents. Yeah. So it's a huge, huge database. So that's Silja Steinsbeck. She's a psychology professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. And she said that when these kids were 10 years old, they realized like, oh, we should ask them about social media too, like how often they use it.

And they've also been asking them about how much they socialize with their friends, like in person. And so now we can answer this question. So we wanted to test whether, is it a case that they spend less time with friends over time if they use social media more or not.

And what did you find? Yeah, I was quite astonished, actually. Those who liked and commented and posted more on social media over time, they were more likely to spend more time with friends offline, not less time with friends. Wait, so like the exact opposite of how people feel? The more time on social media also equals more time with friends? Uh-huh. Yeah. Huh. So they just have more time in the day?

Yeah. I mean, so according to one review, it seems like it's actually more likely to be taking the place of other stuff like reading books, watching TV, magazines. So we do less of that stuff now than we used to. So yeah, for most of us, like it's probably not ruining our social lives. It's not ruining our social lives. We can blame something else for that. And so once I found out about that, I was like, well, what about all this other stuff

that people keep saying over and over again? That like, if you spend a lot of time on social media, your mental health in general is gonna be crappy. Like more anxiety, more depression. And so like, there are dozens of studies that have done that, that like look for a link between how much time we spend on social media. And then they'll also ask them questions that get at whether they have like depression or anxiety and that kind of a thing. And we can look at all of these studies to see like, is there a link here? That's what

you really want to do is not just look at one study but kind of put them all together and see if there's an effect or not yes and when studies do this they mostly find that there is like a small correlation so like you can see this general trend where if you spend more time on socials you are more likely to have like depressive symptoms but like a lot of researchers have been pointing out that like it actually does matter that this link is like really small. What do you mean? So like one review paper

said that it's quote unlikely to be of clinical or practical significance, which is basically nerd speak for like we can measure something here, but it may not mean anything in like the real world oh so by like the link being small like they're not necessarily saying that people who spend a lot of time on social media are really really really depressed it's like they see

they're they feel a little bit crappier than the rest of us yeah and if social media is actually really bad for our mental health you would expect like, if you have people get off it, their mental health would get better. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Some studies have actually done this. They'll, like, have people cut down on social media. And these headlines that we see, right? Because like, you was surprised that the evidence on like depression wasn't stronger. Yeah, right. But like, despite all of that, basically everyone agreed that there are certain things that you might find yourself doing online that are really bad. What are those things? Yeah. So one thing is that researchers have found that if you compare yourself a lot to like the people that you're looking at on your screens, then you're going to feel crappier.

And so like if you're the kind of person who's constantly scrolling through and thinking like, oh, like they're better than me, you know, not consciously. Yeah, yeah. Or sometimes consciously. Yeah. Yeah, basically. Yeah. For me, it's always like the house, like interior decorating videos that the algorithm gives me. And then I feel like, oh, my house looks like that.

Right. This person's got more likes. I feel like social media advantages to find that little insecurity that everyone has. You know, so for you you it's about your house but for me it's like you know how many likes does their podcast have how much bigger is their podcast I don't know how social media does it but it just finds your insecurity whatever it is you know your body's not good enough yeah and body so that is the thing that body image is the thing that a lot of research is on, actually. Like, let's dive into that one.

Oh, okay. So for this, I talked to Rachel Hogg. She's a senior lecturer at Charles Sturt University in Australia. And she told me like, you know, I actually worry about this body image stuff too. And I came off a live TV interview the other day, and I said to one of my friends, I know that this is peak irony, but did my neck look chooky in that interview? So I want to be really clear, I'm not outside of this at all. So Rachel did this study published just a month ago, where she basically wanted to see whether watching content

with disordered eating from TikTok can make people feel worse about their bodies. So if this is something that like for listeners, they think they maybe should avoid, then they should definitely skip ahead about seven minutes. And so here's what they did. The researchers made two different like compilations of videos that they drew from TikTok. In the control video, here's what they did. The researchers made two different like compilations of videos that they drew from TikTok. In the control video, here's what they saw. Videos of nature. We had pets and cooking videos and that kind of quite neutral content. So here are some snippets from that.

One was like telling people how to parallel park. Pull up next to the car that you want to park behind and line up the back of your car with the back of theirs. You knew that you always wanted to be a professional drag queen. I just wanted to be a star any way I got it. Grab your purse. Put it over your head, okay? Your hands through here.

It's a backpack now. It's a backpack. It's a backpack. Okay, Very neutral. Also a little bit helpful. Handy tips in there. So what was the non-neutral stuff people had to watch? For the same amount of time, they watched content on disordered eating behaviours, ranging from the very explicit, but we also had lots of slightly more benign content. So the Fitspo videos and the general kind of day on a plate content

where people are describing what they're eating. What's the Fitspo? That's like people just kind of like showing off their bodies or doing like, here's how to get abs, like follow this workout routine. Okay, okay. Clearly my algorithm's not giving me any of those. No, I get like old people giving me life advice

and for some reason Amish people explaining their culture. It's really big for me right now. Fascinating, can I say. So how long do people have to watch these videos for? They were only like eight minutes long. Okay. Yeah, so they had around 250 women, mostly in their 20s, watch these videos. And they did surveys to see if people were like less satisfied with the way they looked in their bodies after watching these videos. And they did surveys to see if people were like less satisfied with the way

they looked in their bodies after watching these videos. So what did they find? It made a difference. The people who watched the video with the disordered eating stuff were feeling crappier about their bodies afterwards. After just watching eight minutes of this stuff, right? Yeah. So it was really the fact that it took that short a period of time for us to observe this effect. This is horrific, really. And one of the most kind of horrific things to me was just like how common it was to see this kind of stuff on TikTok. Because in the study, they asked people like, do you see this kind of stuff on TikTok because in the study, they asked people like, do you see this kind of content on your For You page? 64% of the participants in our study had encountered disordered eating content. 55% of them said that they had seen videos about suicide.

45% of them said they saw content about self-harm. And like, they didn't happen to get a bunch of people who already had an eating disorder. Like they actually excluded those people from the study. Right. So here's Rachel's take. We know that a lot of them are not searching for this content. So this is not about telling them

just to be careful with what they search for. They're not in control. The algorithm has more control than they do. And a lot of people talk about this kind of thing happening to women. We know from other research that it happens to men too. Most research finds that there's actually like no difference in how badly like men are affected by seeing these like idealized bodies on social media compared to women. And by the way, we did reach out to TikTok about racial study. And in their view, it has some limitations.

Like the data was collected three years ago. They told us, quote, we continually enhance our platform and policies to promote a positive and safe experience and regularly consult with experts, remove content that violates our policies and provide access to supportive resources, end quote. And so I know that these sort of concerns around social media and body image, they've been around for a couple of years now. When you look at like the whole body of research in this space, is it all finding that we go on social media, chances are we're going to feel crappier about our bodies afterwards yeah and so like rachel's study and others do really seem to find these scary effects yeah but like not all studies do find this so it's you know important to say that like okay some studies don't actually find that like

the people who spend more on time on like tiktok for, have a worse body image. Oh. Do we know why they're finding different results? Well, it seems like it might depend on who you are. Like, so maybe some people aren't really affected by this. And then when you like lump everyone together, like some studies do, you might not see an effect on average. But we know that this body image stuff can hit harder if you're the kind of person who compares yourself a lot to other people.

Okay. So it's not necessarily, I don't think that like everyone going on Instagram is going to get a worse body image. But if you're the kind of person who tends to do that, then it's going to affect you more. And maybe even those days also find a stronger link to depression too,

between using a lot of social media and whether or not you're depressed. So if you are someone who feels like you're affected by this, what's the answer? Is it getting off social media? Yeah, that's what I wanted to know. I asked Rachel kind of like, what do you do here? Or actually, I kind of wanted to know if you're a parent, because we know that this can affect kids especially, like what should you do? Should you not let your kid go on social media? And she said it was like a tough call. If all of your 14-year-old daughter's friends are on social media and she's the only person in her group who is not on social media or doesn't have a phone, then that legitimately can be a very isolating thing when everyone else is communicating

on a particular platform that you don't have access to. So it's a rock and a hard place. What I would say to parents in this position is that you cannot protect them from harm. You can try to limit the harm. What you can do is build as much protective armor around them psychologically as you possibly can. So that when you experience the harm, you're still going to experience it, but hopefully it doesn't go all the way to your bones. And like, there is some evidence that teaching kids about how social media might mess with your body image can help like insulate them a little bit and then also spending less time on social media can help when it comes to body image like one study found that limiting people to only spending an hour a day can help and that makes right? The less likely you are to see this content,

the less harmful it can be. So I guess my last question is, Meryl, you got any tips on how we could spend less time on these apps? Yes, actually, there is. So there's one tip that I feel like actually is really helpful. So one thing that we have not talked about yet is that social media does fill this particular need that we have for like just taking a little break. So like this came up a lot at the park. It's like this is like my moment of the day to like feel something, feel nothing, I guess. Feel something, but also feel nothing. Honestly, like it's what I do like after I get home. I'm just like de-stress time. It's how you unwind, yeah.

It's like a little vacation for our brain. Yeah, yeah, yeah, when you're, like, really filled up, and you're not actually going to use this time to learn chess. Your brain can't do that. It can only do stupid shit. Yes, yeah, and that is what Gloria Mark, our attention expert, she calls this kind of activity a rote activity where it's like really engaging.

It sucks up our attention, but also like does not demand too much effort from our brains. I personally don't think it's bad to do rote activities. They can have a function for us. They can have a function to help settle the mind. And so, you know, spending five minutes scrolling through Reddit, there's no problem with that. What is bad is when you get stuck doing them and you can't pull out. Like one of the things that you can do is just like if you don't like social media and you're just kind of you know on it out of habit. Yeah. Then just find

something else that like fulfills that same kind of role that you can switch it out with. So it can be like you know just playing like solitaire or like something off your phone. Knitting. So a lot of people talk about knitting. It calms them. It settles their mind. And if they have a break, they pull out knitting. One guy who I spoke to bounces a ball against, it's like a net, and he bounces the ball against it. That's his productivity, and it just calms him. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said that peeling potatoes gave him his greatest ideas.

He loved to peel potatoes, and that's very road activity. Can't bring knitting into the toilet, though, can you? No, knitting is a whole thing. Yeah, so I tried to detox myself from social media. So for the past like three weeks, I haven't been on Instagram, TikTok, or just like scrolling on Reddit, Facebook. Great. How did you do it? What was your trick? I mean, I feel like I wouldn't have actually done it if I wasn't producing this episode. Okay. I mean, I feel like I wouldn't have actually done it if I wasn't producing this episode. But like, it was, I think it was really interesting because it like, it just kind of. That was not great because then I just got addicted to that instead and was spending like

an hour on that every day. And so I had to put like a limit on how long I spend on that stupid game. But then I feel like I find other stuff that works better. So one thing I've been doing is just scrolling through my own photos and like liking the ones that I like the most. So it's like my own little social media, not without anyone else on it. Oh, that's really nice. That's really good. I guess because I can't quit social media because I need it for work, which I think is true for a lot of people actually,

but what I do is I have phone-off days. Like just a single day on the weekend. You don't use your phone at all for the whole day no no that's right that's right what yeah I couldn't turn my lights on without my phone I couldn't do anything how do you wake up yeah and like yeah and I did I mean I did learn that when I'm catching up with friends like you really really, it's really 90s, you know, you gotta know exactly when to meet them. But people respect the phone off day. And I genuinely feel like I feel better at the end of it. Oh, wow. That's great. I also asked the researchers that I talked to about this. And Sophia told me that she has an app where every time she tries to open stuff like social media, it asks,

like, are you sure you really want to open this? And she said, like, that helped her to cut down. Another scientist told me that she only puts social media on her computer, not her phone. So you might want to try that. Like, you know, just putting in some of these little speed bumps that just make it like a little bit harder to go to and meryl how do you feel now that you're off social media um i think i am probably happier i'm a little more bored i think like in those downtime moments i'm still not sure what to do anymore but maybe that's a good thing it feels like that's kind of a good thing for my brain to not really be sure. Yeah.

And like, I'll probably go back on it, you know, a little bit, but like not as much as I was before. Yeah, yeah. I think from this episode, I guess I just really want to be more aware of how these apps are worming their way into my brain. And also, you know, I really need to keep reminding myself that, you know, behind these apps are these, like, bazillion-dollar companies that are just creating these algorithms

to keep us glued to them. And I really shouldn't be placing any self-worth on what these algorithms, like, decide to shove in my face right you know yeah totally no screw them like get out of my brain I don't actually want to care about that person's like beautiful like in living room like I'm my living room is fine oh if you listening to this episode if you have any tips and tricks for how you stay in control of your social media use, I would love to hear them. And how are you going to tell us? Through social media. You can find us on Instagram, on science underscore VS. Deep irony in my voice as I'm saying this.

And on TikTok, I am at Wendy Zuckerman. Send me photos of your beanies and jumpers if you've started knitting. Thanks so much, Meryl. Thanks, Wendy. That's science versus. And how many citations are in this week's episode? We have 70 citations.

And if people want to see them in all their glory, where should they go? So they can go to our show notes and then we'll have a link for the transcripts in those. So they can read the whole script and all the citations. Great. And also in our show notes, we'll have a link to Gloria's book called Attention Span, which was really good and has like even more tips for kind of how to take control of your, you know, life and social media habits.

Also, completely unrelated. Meryl, did you know that New Zealand's Bird of the Year competition is on right now and everyone can vote? And I have a favorite bird that I want everyone to vote for. Yeah. Have you voted yet? I have not. Oh my God. Okay, so the Tawaki Pikitoka.

Tawaki Pikitoka. It's the eastern rockhopper penguin. Super cute. Looks punkish. We're in the top five. The top five. And voting closes this weekend. So if anyone wants to vote, just go to birdoftheyear.org.nz and pick the Tawaki Piki Toka. It's a beautiful

penguin. It's in serious trouble because of climate change. Tawaki Piki. I'm looking for it right now. I'm going to do it right now. Its population's declined by 30% in the past 30 years. I found it. Oh my gosh, it looks so fierce. Anyway, we're in the top five for New Zealand. I've heard it on good authority that we are now in the top five, but we are not New Zealand's number one bird of the year. That's why Science Versus, we need your help. We'll put the link in the show notes.

Thanks, Penguin. Thanks, Meryl. Thanks, Meryl. Thanks, Wendy. This episode was produced by Meryl Horne, with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, Rose Rimler, Akedi Foster-Keys and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell.

Fact-checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Sam Baer. Music written by Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, Bumi Hidaka and So Wiley. Thanks to all of the researchers that we spoke to for this episode, including Professor Hunt Alcott, Dr Jacqueline Nessie, Professor Patricia Conrad,

Dr Robert Kraut, Dr Andrew Westbrook and Dr Nicholas Isson. A big thanks to everyone who talked to Meryl about social media in Washington Square Park. We really appreciate it. And thanks to Laurie Siegel, Ali Settlemyer and Whitney Potter. An extra thanks to Christopher Suter, Beverly, the Zuckerman family and Joseph LaValle-Wilson. Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever

you get your podcasts. If you are listening to us on Spotify, follow us and tap the bell icon so you'll get a notification every time a new episode comes out. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.