Experts who study Internet use assure that social networks are so attractive and capture users’ attention and time because they activate the brain’s reward circuits and that creates dependency and makes them addictive.
However, there are more and more voices that question whether we can talk about addiction to social networks and who ask that we stop talking about them as if they were a drug because, unlike these, tobacco or alcohol, technology can be put to healthy use.
Now, a study carried out by psychologists at the University of Durham (England) on digital detox suggests that, for most people, the use of social networks is not really addictive because if they do without or significantly reduce their use for a week No changes linked to a withdrawal syndrome are observed.
According to the experiment carried out by these researchers, restricting the use of social networks for a week to people who usually make intensive use of them does impact their mood but does not increase the explicit or implicit desires to use them or other symptoms that They are usually related to abstinence.
And it does not contribute, say psychologists, to improving your well-being, because although some negative feelings or emotions associated with the use of social networks are reduced – such as social comparisons or the fear of missing out -, other positive ones are also reduced, such as example the feeling of social approval.
Niklas Ihssen and Michael Wadsley, the authors of the study, asked 51 students to voluntarily give up using social media and recorded how much time they spent using different mobile applications and also measured their emotional well-being. They also subjected them to exercises and laboratory tests similar to those used in other addiction studies to see their propensity to avoid or not avoid the icons of these applications.
In the conclusions of their work, published in the journal Plos One, the psychologists explain that no changes were detected in the desire for social networks during the week and emphasize that “what we see on social networks is qualitatively different compared to the drugs,” where with a detox experiment like this one would expect compulsive use or craving.
This does not mean that the interruption of social networks or the reduction in their consumption did not affect the participants, who suffered emotional changes, both positive and negative, and therefore, Ihssen emphasizes that “we should not pathologize normal behaviors too much.”
After the “detox” week, all but seven of the students used social networks again, but they significantly reduced their use, going from 3.5 hours a day to about 35 minutes on average, although in the following days they increased the time. dedicated to them up to 2.5 hours.
But not all psychologists and specialists in technology use share the conclusions of the study, according to Science magazine. Some consider that a week of digital detox is not enough time to assess what significant and permanent changes abandoning social networks has on people, and others draw attention to the fact that the time that students stopped dedicating to social networks was spent mostly to video games and online shopping, which can be other ways to satisfy your need for dopamine.
Because regardless of whether it causes withdrawal or not, there are previous studies that correlate excessive use of social networks with an increase in depression and anxiety, and the company Meta, owner of Instagram and Facebook, is facing a class action lawsuit in United States accused of knowingly promoting the addictive and compulsive use of social networks among children and adolescents.
Hence, many psychologists and educators defend that the key in the use of networks is, as with food, to follow a healthy “diet”, consuming them in moderation to minimize the negative effects without giving up other positive ones.