Social Media Addiction in Teens and Young Adults

Social media addiction is a behavioral disorder in which teens or young adults become enthralled by social media and are unable to reduce or cease their consumption of online media despite clear negative consequences and severe drawbacks. While many teenagers engage in some form of online media on a daily basis (including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Vine, Snapchat, and video games), teen social media addiction is characterized by the combination of an excessive media consumption, an increasing reliance on social media as a way to feel good, and an inability to stop or curb this behavior despite suffering losses in friendship, decreased physical social engagement, and a negative impact at school.

What Does Teen Social Media Addiction Look Like?

It’s known that teens and adults alike check their phones upwards of 150 times a day, and it’s been well-documented that our excessive access to social media and our obsession with our online appearance has had a significant impact on teens, including severe self-esteem issues and feelings of anxiety.
Social media not only promotes the decline in mental health for many teens, but it also becomes an easy outlet for online aggression and cyberbullying, further impacting a child emotionally.
An addiction to online media may lead a child to struggle to engage with others on a normal level, as well as affect their academic performance and chances for a future.
Addiction-levels of social media use can also negatively impact existing relationships, leading many teens to struggle to maintain a commitment to their partner or friends due to constant distractions and lack of attention.

What Causes Social Media Addiction?

Addictiveness :

yes, social media – and online media in general – is addictive in a certain sense of the word. The companies that run today’s most successful social networking apps and websites work hard on improving and growing the amount of people they can bring onto their platform, alongside maximizing the amount of time a person spends on their platform. The more time a person spends, the more ads they can run, and the more they’re likely to make a profit off their product. In the end, it’s a matter of business, and any great online platform is built for brutal efficiency when it comes to getting people to stay.

Stress & Self-Esteem :

Social media can be a great tool for good, allowing people to stay in touch despite thousands of miles of distance, communicating at near-instant speeds. It can also be a great tool to engage with communities, receive customer feedback, organize groups and meetups, and more. However, due to the way social media incentivizes an almost voyeuristic look into everyone’s life while incentivizing maximum curation and reputation editing, online media often makes a person’s life look much more exciting and alluring than yours – as well as making it look much more exciting and alluring than it really is. This can severely take advantage of people’s sense of social competitiveness and belonging, often making them feel outclassed, or less attractive.

Social Anxiety:

For people who struggle to maintain a relationship or communicate in person, online media provides the perfect environment to communicate and self-express. While this is a positive thing, it isn’t generally healthy to avoid addressing major issues of social anxiety, especially due to all the negative emotional and physical effects of excessive screen time and online consumption.