Social Media Addiction 101 – Why we’re addicted

Do you find yourself checking your social media streams first thing in the morning and last thing before you go to bed? Does your social media use take away from your productivity? Do you rely on likes, shares, or retweets in order to make you feel good? Are you finding yourself glued to your phone or electronic device for hours on end without understanding why?

Over 210 million people worldwide suffer from Social Media addiction.

If you answered yes to any, or a number or these questions, you may be struggling with an addiction to social media. Social media addiction is a behavioural addiction characterised as being overly concerned with events on social media, and driven by strong controlling urges to pick up your devices and log into social accounts, to the extent that the time and effort spent doing this takes away from other important areas of life.

Did you know that studies have shown that the constant stream of information your brain receives from scrolling through posts filled with likes, shares and retweet’s have an effect on the brain’s reward area to trigger the same kind of chemical reaction as strong street drugs, such as cocaine?

Because of social media’s ability to light up the same reward pathways as addictive substances, individuals can become heavily dependent on repeating the behaviour which can become extremely problematic in many areas of life. In today’s society, you will find that almost everywhere you look in a public space that someone will have their eyes glued to their phone, and with this common social behaviour, and with this, identifying an addiction to social media can be challenging.

If you are finding that social media has become an important coping mechanism to manage emotions such as anxiety , stress or depression, and you are seeing that the rewards you get from streaming are having a negative effect towards your well-being, then it might be time to check in.

Here at Anti-Dose we can work with you to assess the impacts social media addiction has on your life and work with you towards developing a treatment plan which gives you the control back of your life.