Hey Brain Rewirers,
Welcome to this week's newsletter! I’m going to be shedding some light on a pretty relevant topic: the internet and our mental health.
What is the Internet?
I respect that if you’ve made it here, that probably seems like a silly question. But I think like any other medical scenario, if we’re talking about an intervention (in this case, ‘the internet’), we need to define exactly what that intervention is. Is it social media? Is it a search engine? Is it texting? Is it an online news outlet or an e-magazine? If we cannot define it, we cannot measure it, and thus we cannot study it. This is a problem when we talk about studies looking at mental health and social media, or mental health and ‘phones’, or mental health and the ‘internet’ – these are all vague and differing concepts. Even within social media, we see great differences between how content is consumed on Facebook compared to Instagram or TikTok.
It turns out, how we define the internet influences how the internet appears to affect our mental health. When defined as social media use, many studies have observed either no link between social media use and depression or anxiety1,2, or a negative relationship where increased social media use is linked to depression and suicide increases3. However, if we are simply asking if access to the internet and access to computers/smartphones improves our well-being, we see that the answer is clearly yes4. In adults followed for more than 15 years, having access to the internet and electronics improved their well-being.
Who is Using the Internet?
Again, maybe this seems silly to ask. ‘Almost everyone’ is probably the go-to answer. But like our specific intervention, we need to specify the population we’re interested in. Do we care about the effect of ‘the internet’ on children? Or teenagers? Or young adults? Or the elderly?
As it turns out, the answer to whether social media use impacts our mental health depends on our age and gender: in the UK, girls between the ages of 11 and 13 and boys between and ages of 14 and 15 years old show a negative link between social media use and life satisfaction, as does anyone at the age 19, but other ages did not see any impact of social media use on life satisfaction5. This may help to explain why in the aforementioned studies, we see both no impact of social media use on anxiety/depression1,2 and a negative impact of social media use on depression3: including too wide of an age group may blur effects.
Why are We Using the Internet?
Our motives for using ‘the Internet’ affect whether it will negatively or positively impact mental health. Using Facebook for the purpose of making friends seems to reduce loneliness, whereas using Facebook to compensate for lack of social skills increases loneliness over time6. For millennial employees, it also appears that motivation for social media use can either improve burnout or worsen it7.
This also brings us to the point that perhaps it is not social media use driving mental health, but mental health driving social media use. Indeed, one study found that increased depressive symptoms predicted increased social media use in adolescent girls2. If we’re feeling unhappy, we might go on social media to see out happiness, but instead find that seeing other people’s perfect(ly curated) lives makes us even more unhappy.
If you feel like you’re drawn to the internet for all the wrong reasons, you may want to check out my book, which gives a step-by-step guide to rewire your thinking and change your inner narrative!
What Does Mental Health Mean?
So far, I have referred to mental health as anxiety, depression, life satisfaction, well-being, and loneliness. Is this an issue?
It’s great to get such a rounded view of the effect the internet has on our mental health, but it’s important to understand the differences each may bring to the table. The life satisfaction of a 13-year-old will be defined differently from that of a 25-year-old, and the diagnosis of depression or anxiety is something that requires a trained professional, while almost anyone can understand differences in well-being. There may also be greater stigma towards having depression or anxiety than lower well-being, and in self-reported surveys, it may be that people who are more active on the internet have a better understanding of mental health disorders and therefore are more likely to report having symptoms4.
That all being said, there is still another side to mental health that we haven’t mentioned: brain health. We see that our brains function differently when using social media/electronic devices. Multitasking with media increased our distractibility, which can be recorded through changes in brain activity in our prefrontal cortex8. In those suffering from internet addiction, we also see changes in brain activity9. We see that screen-based media use in preschool aged children affects the myelination of white matter tracts10, what that the way the brain communicates is different when watching an animated story versus reading printed text11.
Not all of these changes in the brain may be bad, especially as the research often focuses on children, whose brains are still developing and will be shaped by their environment. For example, we know that the visual cortex is reorganised in children that play Pokemon compared to those who don’t12. As adults, this just means that their brain reacts different when they see Pokemon. And in the elderly, using electronic-based games can improve cognitive performance13.
The Verdict
I think the evidence shows that internet use and social media use influence our mental health in both positive and negative ways, depending on our age, gender, environment, motivations, and probably a whole lot more. This has been the conclusion of other reviews of the literature as well14.
I think we can all agree access to the internet makes our lives easier, and in this sense, it makes sense that internet access improves general well-being4. On the other hand, being at an uncomfortable social age (aka puberty) and dealing with the pressures of school and peers, social media might increase feelings of loneliness and anxiety (for some!) I think what current research shows us is that broad questions are not useful. Ages 13 and 18 are very different. Social media use and internet access are very different things. Depression and life satisfaction are very different measures. We need to be specific about our questions in future research.
Until Next Week,
Nicole x
P.S. Leave a comment with topic request for future newsletters! (People interested in OCD, stay tuned!)
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