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Screentime, social media and anxiety

Mental health SEMH E-safety Handheld devices
Are screentime and social media responsible for the anxiety crisis? And what can we do about it? Dr Andy Cope and Ollie Cope explain
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Here’s a big and controversial thought – what if ADHD and anxiety are not individual problems? What if society has got an attention disorder? What if we have accidentally created a world that stresses you out and messes with your head?

When historians look back at this era, I think they will recognise that we lived through what they might call the Great Acceleration – an era of warp speed.

And it’s not just technology – everything has sped up. A 2007 University of Hertfordshire study found that we are walking 10% faster than we did a couple of decades ago, and we even seem to be talking faster nowadays.

We listen to podcasts at 1.5 speed, we skip the introductions, we download one song rather than listening to the entire album, we consume five-second videos, we use emojis to say how we feel, fast food, next-day delivery…

I work with plenty of adults who are in state of daze and distraction, permanently on edge, responding to alerts. That’s bad enough, but teenagers have it worse.

Teenagers are getting an average of 237 alerts a day (Radesky et al, 2023). Factor in fast food, energy drinks, social media reels, hours of screentime, and poor sleep patterns and you have all the ingredients required to make your head buzz.

I read headline-grabbing news that teenagers’ attention spans have shrunk to just eight seconds – although the actual picture is, of course, more nuanced than this (for more see Maybin, 2017; KCL, 2022).

It points to something we can intuitively sense – our lives are increasingly filled with distractions, our attention spans are getting shorter, and of course we know from the latest NHS data that hordes of young people (as many as 1 in 5 aged 8 to 16) struggle with mental health problems (Newlove-Delgado et al, 2023).

 

Terminally online

It started so innocently. TVs, laptops, smartphones, games consoles – they were all designed for light entertainment. To add value to your life.

Then social media came along and made it even more of a thrill. All of a sudden you could follow, share your thoughts and feelings, upload selfies, videos, and keep in contact with friends, relatives, and celebs.

It was all good, wholesome, innocent fun until, all of a sudden, it wasn’t.

Data from the US suggests that teenagers are now spending nine hours a day in front of a screen (AACAP, 2024), including an average of 4.8 hours a day on social media (DeAngelis, 2024).

There is a feeling that we might have reached a tipping point where social has become anti-social and gaming has reached dangerously addictive levels. 

Everything is okay in moderation but are we moving to a world of being terminally online?

It just so happens that the teenage brain is going through a bunch of changes.

In his 2024 book, The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt calls it “the great rewiring of childhood”. The teenage brain is ready, waiting, wanting, expecting to reach a new level. It is ready for outdoor, face-to-face, relationship-building, stretching experiences. It needs them! But of course, if you are glued to a screen for nine hours a day, you are not giving your brain and body the kind of stimulation it needs.

Just as neurons that fire together wire together, neurons that don’t fire together don’t wire together. If you’re not having enough personal interaction, then your “how to make eye contact” and “how to make small talk” neurons will never fire into action. And instead of feeling at ease in society, you can end up feeling socially anxious.

 

The ‘infinite scroll’

Please note, we are not placing all the world’s ills at the feet of social media. The mental health epidemic is complex. However, it just so happens that social media trains your brain to think in ways that are exactly the opposite to what is good for your happiness and wellbeing.

It encourages you to be materialistic, judgemental, boastful, petty, and negative. Worse still, a phone-based life makes it difficult for people to be fully present with others, even when they are in the same room. 

More often than we would care to admit, most of us have been trapped in the “infinite scroll”. Minutes tick into hours and you are well beyond watching the thing that you were actually looking for. The social media algorithms have trapped you in the habit of mindlessly doom-scrolling for the sake of it. Apps are competing for your eyeballs! 

That is why online articles contain so many links and there is so much clickbait. Focus is not profitable, but distraction is.

Pulling all this together, so many research studies tell us that the ability to create and maintain strong personal relationships is the biggest single ingredient in wellbeing.

Therefore, the most disturbing aspect of social media and excessive screentime is the effect that it is having on our real-life relationships with other people – and, as a consequence, on our mental health.

 

There’s only one solution

“Zoochosis” is the effect whereby animals behave strangely in captivity. Often, they are pacing, scratching, rocking, or chewing the bars of their cage. Zoo animals often develop mental health problems. They are medicated to ease their symptoms, when in actual fact it is a non-medical problem. The environment is the problem. 

So here’s another huge question: have humans accidentally “caged” themselves? With our collective inability to concentrate, are we suffering from zoochosis?

Either way, the current sticking plaster approach is not going to work. It addresses the symptoms, not the cause. There is no way the school is ever going to achieve lasting change by commanding teenagers to leave their phones in their bags or lock them in safe boxes. 

The only solution is to get teenagers, parents, and teachers on board, voluntarily. Yes, it sounds far-fetched but bear with us. We are talking about getting teenagers to want to spend less time on their phones, and the only way to do that is to address what Prof Haidt calls the “collective action problem”.

When a child rocks up at big school they see that a lot of their peers have gotten smartphones and are interacting with each other, sometimes even during class time. It puts significant social pressure on the child to get a smartphone and social media account, even though all students would be better off if none of them had these things.

The very best parents try to do what is right. They limit their child’s screentime or put off getting a phone until they are 12, or 14, or 16, and guess what, they suffer the classic teenage tantrums. The child grumbles that they are the worst parent in the world when, in actual fact, they are the best.

The only effective way to tackle the age of anxiety is to address the collective action problem. The solution (ironically) is education. Oh, and it takes courage!

It is a three-pronged approach that educates teenagers, parents, and teachers in some of the themes outlined in this article. 

Lay out the facts and give them a choice. If done correctly, there will be enough sign-up from all three parties.

Once not bringing your phone into school starts to become the norm, the culture has shifted, and attention spans may be clawed back.
Which brings me full circle. If attention deficit and anxiety are societal problems, they require collective action.

  • Dr Andy Cope is a wellbeing expert, author, and recovering academic. He specialises in positive psychology and the science of human flourishing. He is the author of a number of books including The Art of Being Brilliant and The Little Book of Emotional Intelligence. Read his previous articles for SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/andy-cope/ 
    The Art of Brilliance runs staff, teenager and parenting workshops and webinars, including a social media detox workshop and the flagship programme called The Art of Being Brilliant. Visit www.artofbrilliance.co.uk/training/education/ 
  • Ollie Cope has a degree in psychology, a Master’s in computational neuroscience and cognitive robotics and is part way through a PhD that examines the link between social media and attention spans. He delivers wellbeing and social media detox workshops in businesses and schools.

 

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