Social media animals

Social media apps continue their takeover of our lives

AFTER the alarm clock rings in the morning, many people pick up their smartphone. They check messages, maybe the weather forecast, and then see what their friends are doing on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.

This is repeated several times during the day: at school and work, at the bus stop, in the evening on the couch.

Excessive scrolling through social media timelines can become an addiction. However, Instagram, Snapchat and the rest are not bad in themselves – on the contrary, they can be beneficial, experts say.

“Social media also means an opportunity,” says Rainer Thomasius, head of a centre for childhood and adolescence addiction issues at the Hamburg-Eppendorf University Medical Centre in Germany.

Puberty, for example, is all about emancipating yourself from your family and trying out different roles. Social media can help with that.

But of course there are downsides. “The main problem with social media is that it provides so many things that appeal to us,” says Tobias Dienlin, a media psychologist at the University of Hohenheim in Germany.

You can see beautiful pictures and engaging short texts. You can publish content and get appreciation for it via likes. “Likes are compliments, and we humans appreciate compliments,” Dienlin says.

Social networks are designed to keep us scrolling for as long as possible. The effect is that you start reading and don’t know when to stop. Whether people can stop on their own or run the risk of losing control depends on their personality type.

People with low self-esteem are particularly susceptible to excessive social media use.

Those who find it difficult to find friends in real life can be buoyed by being seen and liked on social media – even though the constant pressure to post new content can in itself make them unhappy.

It’s also problematic if Twitter or Instagram are automatically opened to distract people in the event of boredom, anger or grief. To deal with such personal issues, you should have other strategies rather than looking at a smartphone screen.

In order for doctors to speak of an addiction, several criteria must be met. One of the most important, says Rainer Thomasius, is loss of control.

If you no longer think about when and why you post, scroll or like something and you feel as if you can’t stop, you may have a problem.

In such a situation, people like addiction therapist Christian Gross can help. Parents come to him concerned about stressed and inattentive children who break down in school and spend more and more time in virtual worlds.

The problem, as he sees it: “We have regulations for other addictive substances, but not for social media.”

There are apps available that can help users to exert control over their social media use.

For example, for Android users there’s the free Google app Digital Wellbeing, which can be used to set limits on the use of certain apps. On iPhones and iPads the Screen Time function does the same thing.

“Anything that promotes self-limitation and self-reflection is very welcome,” says addiction expert Rainer Thomasius.