Smartphone addiction is leading to “brain rot,” doctors say
By Meg Oliver
Asheville, North Carolina — Katy Paige Rosenberg, a freshman at the University of North Carolina Asheville, recently realized what too much scrolling on her phone was doing to her.
She estimates she was probably spending about nine hours a day on her phone.
“I was just kind of constantly on it,” Rosenberg said. “…I wasn’t able to focus, because I would have to take out my phone every couple of minutes.”
Stories like hers are familiar, but now it is possible to see the science behind it, according to Dr. Brent Nelson, a psychiatrist and the chief medical information officer for Southern California-based Newport Healthcare, which operates mental health treatment centers for teens nationwide.
“Smartphones have wide-reaching changes all over the brain,” Nelson explains.
He showed CBS News MRI images from a 2021 study in Korea that showed major increases in brain activity — the negative effects of smartphone addiction.
“This is showing where the brain is working extra hard compared to a non-addicted brain when asked to do actually, a pretty simple task,” Nelson said.
In the study, the MRI images of addicted smartphone users’ brains were so colorful, meaning so active, it made them less attentive and more easily distracted — what is now informally called “brain rot.”
“Let’s take school for example,” Nelson said of how brain rot can manifest. “You’re sitting in class and you’re trying to focus. They’re going to be looking around, not attending to what the teacher is trying to teach them.”
Nelson says emerging research points to even greater risks.
“We’re just starting to see these changes, and we know they’re connected to behavioral changes, depression, anxiety,” Nelson said. “The dangers are hiding in there.”
Rosenberg agrees with that assessment.
“Social media had really influenced me in a lot of ways,” Rosenberg said. “TikTok would kind of push these videos of people popping an edible before school. And I was like, ‘If I do this, maybe I’ll be cool.’ And I started self-medicating.”
To deal with that, last year, she checked into a treatment facility. She believes that if she had not gone to treatment, “I don’t think I’d be here. It was really bad.”
Rosenberg had to give up her phone in treatment. There, the Gen Zer found other outlets, from drawing to playing guitar, that helped rewire her brain. The key, perhaps, were analog antidotes, reminiscent of another generation.
Says Nelson: “Playing in the dirt, drinking from the hose, sort of the Gen X kind of mentality, is shown to actually allow folks to recover, to feel better, to make it easier to kind of go about their day.”
Why young brains are especially vulnerable to social media
The science behind why apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat impact your child’s brain in a different way than your adult brain.
Starting around age 10, children’s brains undergo a fundamental shift that spurs them to seek social rewards, including attention and approval from their peers.
At the same time, we hand them smartphones (Kids & Tech, Influence Central, 2018).
Social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat have provided crucial opportunities for interaction that are a normal part of development—especially during a time of severe isolation prompted by the pandemic. But they’ve also been increasingly linked to mental health problems, including anxiety, depressive symptoms, and body image concerns.
So, why do kids face a higher risk of harm on social media?
Let’s dig deeper.
[Related: Potential risks of content, features, and functions: The science of how social media affects youth]
Social rewards and the brain
Between the ages of 10 and 12, changes in the brain make social rewards—compliments on a new hairstyle, laughter from a classmate—start to feel a lot more satisfying. Specifically, receptors for the “happy hormones” oxytocin and dopamine multiply in a part of the brain called the ventral striatum, making preteens extra sensitive to attention and admiration from others.
[Related: What neuroscience tells us about the teenage brain]
“We know that social media activity is closely tied to the ventral striatum,” said Mitch Prinstein, APA’s chief science officer. “This region gets a dopamine and oxytocin rush whenever we experience social rewards.”
Right next door to the ventral striatum lies the ventral pallidum, a region of the brain key for motivating action. These structures, which lie beneath the more recently evolved cortex, are older parts of the brain that drive instinctual behaviors.
In adulthood, social media use is also linked to activation in the brain’s reward centers, but two key differences may lessen harm, Prinstein said. First, adults tend to have a fixed sense of self that relies less on feedback from peers. Second, adults have a more mature prefrontal cortex, an area that can help regulate emotional responses to social rewards.https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=AMERICANPSYCHOLOGICALASSOCIATION5915632486&light=true&artwork=false
Permanent and public
In youth, the drive for approval has historically helped kids and teens develop healthy social skills and connections. But arriving at school in a new pair of designer jeans, hoping your crush will smile at you in the hallway, is worlds away from posting a video on TikTok that may get thousands of views and likes, Prinstein said.
Part of what makes online interactions so different from in-person ones is their permanent—and often public—nature, according to research by Jacqueline Nesi, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at Brown University (Psychological Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 3, 2020).
“After you walk away from a regular conversation, you don’t know if the other person liked it, or if anyone else liked it—and it’s over,” Prinstein said. “That’s not true on social media.”
Instead, kids, their friends, and even people they’ve never met can continue to seek, deliver, or withhold social rewards in the form of likes, comments, views, and follows.
As children and teens increasingly go online for entertainment and connection, parents, scholars, and policymakers are concerned that young people’s biology is making them particularly vulnerable to—and in some cases, even exploited by—social media.
Protecting young users
Further research shows how this biological vulnerability plays out in the lives of children and teens. Younger social media users are more likely than older ones to have body image issues, while kids who use Instagram or Snapchat before age 11 face a higher risk of online harassment (Saiphoo, A. N., & Vahedi, Z., Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 101, 2019; Charmaraman, L., et al., Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 127, 2022).
These and other findings have prompted recommendations from the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, MD, that social media and other technology companies help minimize fallout from their products, including by prioritizing the wellbeing of young users and by sharing their data with independent researchers (Protecting youth mental health (PDF, 1.01MB), The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory, 2021).
“It’s time we stopped trying to make a profit on kids’ developing brains,” Prinstein said. “For the first time in human history, we have given up autonomous control over our social relationships and interactions, and we now allow machine learning and artificial intelligence to make decisions for us.”
“We have already seen how this has created tremendous vulnerabilities to our way of life. It’s even scarier to consider how this may be changing brain development for an entire generation of youth,” he said.
Can internet scrolling cause ‘brain rot’?
How to counter-act the effects of binge-watching on your brain
Many of us are guilty of it—mindlessly binge-scrolling through internet content. But could that be damaging our brains?
Oxford’s word of the year for 2024 is “brain rot,” which refers to the feeling you get after spending long hours aimlessly scrolling through internet content.
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“It’s a real thing, and it’s concerning for a lot of people,” said Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent.
Medical experts say consuming long stretches of low-quality content online can trigger cognitive decline and brain fog and shorten our attention span. But overindulging in internet content can cause even more severe symptoms like depression in teens.
“Nore than three hours for teens seemed to double their risk for depression,” Gupta explained.
So how does excessive binge-watching impact our brains?
“It tends to thin certain areas of the brain called the cortex that is responsible for your memory and your perception,” Gupta said.
So what can we do to prevent “brain rot”?
Limiting screen time can help.
The most recent survey from the PEW research center asked a group of teens 13-17 about their tech usage.
- 95% say they have access to a smartphone
- 46% say they use the internet “almost constantly.”
But it’s not just a teen problem.
A different PEW survey found that 90% of adults say they use the web daily, and 41% say they are online “almost constantly.”
Medical experts say it’s important to keep track of how much time you spend online to prevent binge-watching.
