Social Media Burnout and Digital Wellbeing
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Last Show with David Cooper, where bad therapy meets good radio. If you use social media all the time, you might find yourself scrolling and watching videos and feeling burnt out. How good can this stuff really be for your brain? Well, that's what we're going to discuss here with Dr. Ashley Haas, a marketing professor at the University of Portland and co-founder of the Disconnect Collective. Ashley, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
So you look into like how good social media is for you. I guess in short, it's amazing for you.
What is social media burnout and how does it affect us?
It does nothing bad to your brain and we should all use it every day all the time. Am I on? Am I getting that right?
You are perfect. Absolute flawless. No notes.
But OK, I don't use like TikTok and these highly addictive platforms very much, but I worry for people that do not just like what it does to your brain, but just the raw amount of time that you end up spending doing these activities.
Yeah, absolutely. So my background is in marketing. I am not a neuroscientist. I ask people surveys. I'm like, on a scale of one to ten, how depressed are you? And they say, oh, I'm pretty depressed because I'm on social media all the time, right? But I have brought a lot of neuroscience into what I study and the things that are going on, like looking at this lens of how is social media impacting us. And the long story short is it's not the worst thing for us, but I wouldn't say that it's the best thing. Yeah. Is it our fault?
fault that we end up so like engaged with it and then burning out from it or were these things designed to kind of like take advantage of the way that our brains are wired i'm not really asking from like a neuroscience perspective but from more from a marketing perspective are these things designed to be highly addictive i mean i know the answer is yes but in what way
Yeah, the answer is yes, and it is because of neuroscience, unfortunately. But if we look at how our brains develop, we have given the most addictive form of anything to young children, to people maybe like our age, parents, grandparents. Research shows us that the youngins, their brain's not fully developing until you're 25, right? Like here in the U.S., it's like, yay, 21, I can drink now, 25, prefrontal cortex has finally developed. But that's not actually the case we're finding. With all of the short form content around us, our brains aren't developing more until we're 30, 35. And when our prefrontal cortex is taxed, so that's the front of our brain, it helps us do impulse control. It helps us regulate our emotions.
It helps us make decisions and strong social bonds. Yeah, our brain pretty much is kind of melting. And the short answer is yes, they are designed To have this kind of almost gambling-like capability where you have the loop that is never ending, the content never happens, and then you're getting that variable dopamine hit.
How does Dr. Ashley Haas view the impact of social media on mental health?
So when you're on the platforms, you want more because you want more likes, you want more comments, saves, shares, whatever your metric is that you're looking at. And then the notifications are like coaxing you like, please come back, come back more. I'm totally like young, vulnerable populations. This is impacting. There's not a lot of research done on people who are like my age and 30s, 40s, 50s, but it's coming. And I don't know if you have parents, grandparents, they might be addicted to Facebook or like some sort of specific app where they just spend hours and hours scrolling or whatever.
It's my mom in Canasta, but that's a conversation for somebody else. She plays online.
Yeah.
Not to mention doom scrolling. I say I don't do these video platforms as much as other people who engage with them for hours and hours. But one thing I'm guilty of is like, I'll follow the news. I'll see a story that just seems like awful and sensational. And then I got to see the next one that's slightly worse. And the next one that's slightly worse. This kind of trigger of like dopamine hit and then kind of chasing it to get something slightly more intense.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:36
2
What is social media burnout and how does it affect us?
0:36–2:45
3
How does Dr. Ashley Haas view the impact of social media on mental health?
2:45–5:43
4
Are social media platforms designed to be addictive?
5:43–6:53
5
What neuroscience explains our engagement with social media?
6:53–9:47
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Last Show with David Cooper
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