TikTok and dopamine hits: This is your brain on social media

This is the second in a four-part reader challenge on creating a healthy relationship with social media.

Social media apps can have the same effect on your brain as an addictive drug thanks to their algorithm-driven potency, their ever-present availability and their never-ending quantity.

Lembke is the author of the book “Dopamine Nation,” published in 2021. On the first page, she writes, “The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. If you haven’t met your drug of choice yet, it’s coming soon to a website near you.”

She’s been retained as a medical expert witness in a wide-ranging multidistrict lawsuit against social media platforms alleging harms from adolescent addiction.

We asked Lembke how she thinks social media affects the brain in this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity:

Q: You say the smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle. How does that apply to social media?

A: In likening the smartphone to the hypodermic syringe, what I’m really trying to talk about is how the 24/7 access — everywhere, anywhere, all at once — that the smartphone provided vastly accelerated our vulnerability to addiction to digital media. When we added this mobile device, we created a delivery mechanism that really exploded the addictive potential of the medium.

Q: We get pleasure, a dopamine hit, from social connection. How is it different or more potent when we’re getting it from our phones and computers as opposed to just getting coffee with a friend?

A: If you think about the way we have made social connections over most of our existence, first of all, we had to get up off the couch and go and meet people. You had your family, you had your neighbors, you had the people that you went to school with. And most of them were of average looks and intelligence. In the process of creating those intimate human connections, we experienced disappointment and frustration and boredom and annoyance. We had empathetic failures and rifts and betrayals that we either repaired or we didn’t. All of it took a lot of time and it took a lot of work.

Now fast forward. You’ve got social media. You don’t have to leave your couch. You swipe right and you swipe left and there you are interacting with somebody. Or maybe it’s a nobody. Maybe it’s just AI that seems like a somebody. If it’s no longer immediately reinforcing or slightly boring, you can just press down and speed it up, or you can stop it and go find somebody else. And there are an infinite number of somebody elses that you can find. There are brain imaging studies showing that if people look at a picture that was liked by many other people, that releases more activity in the brain. You’ve also got this crowdsourcing effect. You’re having the same outrage or the same laughter or sadness with millions of other people now. You’ve taken a very healthy human experience and you’ve turned it into this potent drug because of the sheer numbers, the numerification, the interactive ability, the rapidity of the turnaround time.

Q: You talk about in your book that if you’re constantly getting these fixes of whatever thing you’re addicted to, you stop feeling the pleasure as much. Talk about how that applies to social media.

A: That’s called tolerance, or neural adaptation. In order to compensate for the surge of dopamine released in the reward pathway in response to intoxicants in all their forms, including digital media, the brain downregulates dopamine transmission into this dopamine deficit state which feels exactly like depression, anxiety, insomnia, irritability and a state of constant craving. We see the exact phenomenology in clinical situations with people who get addicted to digital media as people who are addicted to drugs and alcohol: continued compulsive use despite harm to self or others and great difficulty stopping, even when they know they need to and even when they want to. And then when they stop, the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance, which are again, anxiety, irritability, insomnia, depression and craving.

Q: If I think I have a problem with social media, if my use is compulsive and constant and out of control, why do you recommend trying a social media fast?

A: If you know you have a problem with a specific form of digital media, you should try to abstain for a month. Even if you aren’t sure, you should probably try to abstain from it for a month and see how hard it is. Often we can feel like it’s not having a negative impact on our lives. We can feel like we’re managing it. And yet, when we try to give it up, we find it’s extremely difficult. And if we give it up for long enough, we find that it really was having an adverse impact on our lives that we weren’t able to see when we were in the throes of it.

Q: You’ve seen that when people addicted to social media abstain, they’ll feel worse — irritable, anxious, depressed — before they feel better. But you’ll eventually have an improvement of mood, sleep and other measures of physical and mental well-being?

A: No guarantees, but you may. At the very least, you’ll learn a lot about how that digital media is impacting your life. In my clinical experience, most people discover that they’re not happy with the way they’re using their drug of choice, including digital media. They want to use differently. They want to use less.

Q: If you asked me why I wasted the last half-hour looking at social media, I would have probably said because I was bored. Is boredom such a bad thing?

A: A couple of things here. Our engagement with our drug of choice can result from boredom, as a way to distract ourselves from boredom. But it can also beget boredom. Once our brains become hyperstimulated by these supernormal stimuli, other things will seem boring. That’s why that period of abstinence is necessary. It actually allows those things that became boring because we got addicted to our drug of choice to become more interesting again.

This happens in nuclear families now all the time. People aren’t talking to each other. They’re not engaging. They find each other boring because they’re putting all their time and energy into relationships online. But with time and reinvestment in our other pursuits, those things become interesting again. How do you make something not boring? You pay a lot of attention to it. I would also say that boredom allows our brains to rest and also allows us to be creative. If we don’t have the time and space to have our own thoughts, how are we ever going to come up with anything that’s not just a reaction to an external stimulus?