What Does Scrolling Do to Us?
The challenge: Stop scrolling on your phone long enough to read this story.
The payoff? Get up to speed on notable research about how smartphones impact our well-being. Here, we share findings and offer solutions, with help from UM psychology professor Dan Bailis—just in time for you to take a summer vacation from your device.
Scrolling and our brain
You likely know your brain releases dopamine (the feel-good hormone) when you see something surprising or dramatic on social media. And that this famous neurotransmitter—once dubbed “the Kim Kardashian of molecules” by a British psychologist—deals in pleasure and reward.
But did you know our bodies self-regulate, returning dopamine levels to normal, and when we binge on pleasure, our brain overcompensates and dips our dopamine lower and lower? This in turn makes us crave higher levels of dopamine, which we conveniently seek from more scrolling.
This is how Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation and addictions expert at Stanford University, explains it. She also calls the smartphone “the modern-day hypodermic needle.”
Yet Bailis—a Princeton grad who studies what guides our decisions about health and well-being—reminds us we aren’t helpless to these devices that make it so easy to binge. It’s not all doom and gloom, he says.
While dopamine plays a role in the reward signaling in our brains, this neurotransmitter—and a dozen others—are involved in every complex behaviour we perform. So don’t be so quick to blame the dopamine boost for our poor phone habits, Bailis says. We’re not exactly apathetic bystanders.
“We’re still the operators of our minds and our bodies, despite that. Think of those neurotransmitters as being the mediators of our decisions, but our decisions are still our decisions to make.”
How much is too much
Guidelines by the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology say to limit screen time to two hours per day for kids 5-17 and no more than three hours for adults. Australia took a historic step last year when they passed a national law requiring social platforms ban users younger than 16. There’s mounting research from various universities, including Harvard and Oxford, not only about the detrimental impact on mental health in youth but to the developing brain itself, including shrinking grey matter and shortening attention spans.
In the U.S last July then-surgeon general Vivek Murthy called for warning labels on these platforms, saying teens spending upwards of three hours a day on social doubled their risk of anxiety and depression symptoms.
Closer to home, the Canadian Paediatric Society recommends physicians make time during routine checkups to talk with parents about screen time during their kids’ early development—not only quantity but quality.
“Excessive passive or purposeless screen time for preschool-aged children is linked to language and social-emotional delays, interruptions to sleep patterns, and lower levels of physical activity—but the greatest costs are the lost opportunities for experiential learning and relationship-building,” the Society said.
If you don’t use it, you lose it
At all ages, prioritizing virtual interactions over in-person means social skills suffer, echoes Bailis. There’s a lot of nuance during face-to-face engagement: non-verbal cues, tone, sarcasm, all of which are key components of socialization.
“It’s not really different from the situation with physical activity. Our muscles and bones will atrophy if we don’t go out and exercise. We’re starting to see some evidence of that with smartphone usage,” he says.
“And at a time when many Canadians are experiencing loneliness, by giving us a tasty and convenient alternative to hanging out in groups, smart phones and social media are mostly helping us to pacify ourselves in this loneliness. They are not helping us to get up and do something about it.”
More than 33 million Canadians scroll social media. They spend about two hours per day on these apps (a half hour less than the global average), with young people being the most active, and women more active than men, especially among the older demographic. Facebook is still the most popular social app, followed by Instagram. Worldwide, smartphone subscriptions will exceed 7.7 billion by 2028, Statista revealed.
Are we addicted?
Questionnaires that screen for addiction typically ask about whether or not we’re missing out on life events, skipping work, or lying about our usage, explains Bailis. He clarifies that while many people talk about being “addicted” to their phone, most aren’t—they’re simply having a hard time with self-regulation.
That’s why he likens our problems with social media to our problems with eating highly processed food or avoiding physical activity. In his own co-led study, only one in three of the participants (all university students) were able to maintain a goal of less than 30 minutes a day on social media for 10 days. The more the students reduced their scrolling, the more their overall well-being improved over the length of the 20-day study.
“But keep in mind, while these improvements were reliable, they were not large—and they might have occurred just because participants were being successful in a personal challenge. Meeting a goal makes us feel good.”
Three tips to reduce screen time
1. Look at your behaviours and set an initial goal. “It should be something you see as an attainable next step—specific and measurable. See how that goes, then try the next thing and build up to an outcome,” says Bailis.
2. Be your own problem-solver and self-regulate in a way that works best for you (and, if you have kids, all the more reason to raise them as their own problem-solvers). “Some people switch back to old flip phones but not everyone should go out and get a flip phone. The point is: They’ve found a way, right? They’ve creatively solved this problem in their own life. I don’t have my phone in my room when I’m trying to sleep. Of the many ways that it can interfere with health, sleep hygiene is a really important one to me.”
3. Focus on social interactions when online—and off. “When you do use social media, use it in ways that enhance your personal relationships with others. And when you decide to unplug, focus on your surroundings, including the other people in your midst.”