By Mallory Mattingly
Excessive screen time drives your teen’s anxiety, Crosswalk Headlines reported, but there is a solution.
ScienceDirect conducted a study of 580 U.S. and Canadian teens aged 12-17. They found that any teen who spent over two hours a day on social media a day experienced more anxiety and was “four times as likely to face emotional and behavioral issues.”
The COVID-19 pandemic’s “extensive and enduring mental health effects” also continue to affect young people’s mental health and screen use, the study found, “affecting adolescents both with and without pre-existing vulnerabilities.”
“It’s one of those findings that you don’t even want to be true,” admitted neuroscientist Emma Duerden in an interview with Phoenix 12 News.
Duerden explained that 45% of teens from Western University in Canada had “clinically elevated anxiety levels.”
“Based on past studies, it should be between 8% and 15%,” she explained. “And before the pandemic, it was probably about 6% in school-aged children. It really is surprising, and really speaks to a call to action.”
Duerden explained why anxiety levels are higher among children.
“The pre-frontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that tells you, ‘I should put this device down now,’ develops much later and children are really lacking that ability,” the neuroscientist said, per a post from Brain Suite.
Related: Are Social Media and Teen Suicide Linked?
“For young children and for teenagers, their brains really aren’t wired to be able to process excessive rewards,” she shared in a conversation with CBC News.
Studies have found that social media use triggers a dopamine release, “a neurotransmitter that reinforces rewarding behaviors,” activating the same neural pathways as substance addictions.
“Using social media lights up the same parts of your brain as other addictions, such as drugs, alcohol, and gambling,” said researcher Laura Elin Pigott.
These pathways can make it difficult for young people to self-regulate social media use. However, doing that might just be the solution to their anxiety.
“Limiting screen time to particular hours of the day, or having screen time free zones, for example, in the house, can really help with limiting the overall amount of screen time that children and adolescents are receiving,” Duerden encouraged.
“There’s been a large-scale meta-analysis demonstrating that the two-hour rule is a good benchmark,“ she told 12 News. “What we showed in the study is screens are a modifiable risk factor, and maybe just reducing the time on it every day could go a long way in terms of helping children.”
With the growing mental health crisis among young people, many parents (and even teens) need to know the importance of setting proper screen time limits and boundaries.
Read Next: Americans Use These Tools to Limit Their Screen Time
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