Hey there and welcome to Life Noggin.
It’s pretty hard to tell me and Triangle Bob apart when you zoom in on our heads.
Ya know cause our animator didn’t give us faces!
You humans are quite a bit different though!
You have so many awesome facial features that really set you apart.
So much so, that you even made an online book of all your faces!
It actually seems like many of you spend a lot of time on there.
Does that mean you’re addicted to Facebook and social media?
Let’s find out!
We should probably start by seeing how much time people spend on social platforms.
After looking at a few different sources, it seems like the average person spends about
two hours a day on social media.
Over your lifetime, this could add up to about 5 years!
According to one study, those two hours a day are mostly spent on sites like Facebook
and YouTube, averaging about an hour and 15 minutes between them.
Hopefully they’re watching Life Noggin!
Twitter didn’t get as much love, averaging only about a minute a day.
That all seems like a lot of time, but does that mean it’s an addiction?
Well, according to the American Psychiatric Association, addiction is a complex condition
of the brain where a person has compulsive substance use despite there being harmful
consequences.
People with addiction tend to have an intense focus on what they’re addicted to, to the
point where it takes over their life.
What makes it so hard to break an addiction is that it can change the way your brain is
wired, giving you harsh cravings that make it difficult to stop.
Studies of brain imaging have even shown changes in areas of the brain that relate to judgement,
decision making, learning, memory, and behavior control.
So is this what’s happening with Facebook and social media?
It’s hard to say for sure.
Social media is so new, that it’s difficult to compare it to the substances that we usually
include when talking about addiction, like alcohol and tobacco.
That being said, we /are/ starting to give more credit to an addiction that might be
pretty similar: video games.
That’s because the American Psychiatric Association includes Internet Gaming Disorders
as disorders that requires further research, but that can result in clinically significant
impairment or distress.
In the past year, the World Health Organisation has also added Gaming disorders to their International
Classification of Diseases, which is used by medical practitioners around the world
to diagnose conditions.
The World Health Organization’s classification is a bit more decisive than the one from the
American Psychiatric Association, but both give credit to video game disorders being
a real problem.
Now, online video games are obviously not the same as a site like Facebook, yet they
do have similar social aspects.
It’s possible that in the future we’ll see health organizations also classifying
social media as a type of addiction or disorder.
Still, sites like Facebook do have quite a few qualities that make you want to come back
to them.
Through constant feeds and giving you push notifications on your phone, social media
sites try their best to keep you on their app or website.
Google and Facebook further their reach by also being commonly used to sign into other
sites.
Social media sites also seem to have a significant impact on how you feel, furthering your connection
to them.
According to a recent study, after removing positive posts from the feeds of over 680,000
Facebook users, people made less positive posts and more negative ones.
When negative posts were removed from their feeds, the opposite happened, suggesting that
emotions can be contagious.
No matter what, whether something is an official addiction or not, that doesn’t mean that
it won’t have problems.
If you feel like you’re spending too much time on social media or that it’s taking
away from areas of your life, then it might be a good idea to use it less or take a break.
So how much time do you spend on social media? Do you think you're addicted to it?
Let me know in the comments below!