Addicted to Social Media -- Is this even possible? (Patreon)

[This is a transcript with references.]

I recently learned there’s a new trend on social media: monk mode. First time I heard of this, I thought it means you pull a hood over your face and start brewing beer in the basement, but not so. Monk mode, it turns out, means cutting out distractions and going into self-isolation to become more productive. It’s supposedly based on science and  particularly concerned with avoiding social media, because that’s addictive. And addictions are not good. But can social media really be addictive? Does the monk mode work? And what’s the science behind it? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

First things first, what is monk mode? Monk mode is a lifestyle trend that aims to help adherents to live a purposeful life by focusing on long-term goals. To achieve those goals, the monk foregoes short-term rewards and distractions, such as unhealthy food, social media, and other forms of entertainment, for example binge watching YouTube. Though I’d argue that watching all my videos is a very worthy life goal, just take my word for it.

Monk mode is loosely based on the philosophy of Buddhist monks, hence the name, and seems to be particularly popular among millennials. Monk mode encourages practitioners to focus on personal development, self-reflection, and productivity, and to think about what they’re doing.

To me this sounds basically like growing up, and in my day we did it without becoming monks. Or nuns, as it were. But in the past years, monk mode has attracted interest as a way of science-based stress management. And since its particular appeal seems to be the claim that it’s backed up by science, I thought it’d be worth looking at.

Monk mode has been popularized by some influencers like Jay Shetty. Shetty is a 35-year-old British guy who spent three years literally living as a monk in India. After his return he wrote a book called “Think Like A Monk” that appeared with perfect timing at the height of the COVID pandemic. By now he’s amassed a few million followers on YouTube where he’s handing out advice on everything from long-distance relationships to mental health. The guy’s basically a living cliché of a self-help guru.

Then there’s Imah Ghadzi is also a British guy, but a decade younger. He seems to have tried various ways of making money online until hitting gold with NFTs a few years ago. Ghadzi is less self-help guru and more personified self-attribution bias, that’s the tendency of wealthy people to attribute their success to their own talents and efforts rather than to external circumstance or luck. Ghadzi in particular attributes his success to monk mode.

In his videos he explains that he sometimes completely cuts himself off from social media, television, alcohol, junk food, turns off the color on his phone for months at a time, and generally sounds like a lot of fun to be with. He believes that this level of discipline has helped him achieve an incredible amount of focus and claims it works because he is training his brain’s dopamine system, which brings us to the science.

Living life in monk mode is supposedly all about paying attention to your dopamine levels. Dopamine is a hormone produced in the brain that plays a major role in what’s called the “reward system”. It’s a neurotransmitter, which means it aids the transfer of certain signals between neurons. The story goes that dopamine makes you feel good after certain activities, which encourages you to repeat them. This slowly rewires your brain and builds habits. Dopamine affects everything from your desire to move, to your mood, to the ability to pay attention.

Dopamine is incredibly important when it comes to survival. Studies have found, for example, that genetically modified mice who could not produce dopamine appeared normal at birth, but failed to learn food-seeking behavior, and would later have died if they had not been fed.

Most of you watching this video probably aren’t mice, but dopamine plays a similar role for humans. Dopamine levels have been found to rise with many activities that could reasonably be said to be linked to survival: eating, sex, exercise, and social contact, though individual differences are large. Low dopamine levels are linked to mental health disorders, such as major depression, and other illnesses, for example Parkinson’s disease.

Some of the most addictive drugs we know, such as heroine, work by artificially increasing dopamine way beyond its natural level. But even if you’re not doing drugs, it seems plausible that dopamine regulation might become a problem in modern times. Pursuing dopamine kicks might have been a good strategy in the stone age, but life is good now. You can get a lot of dopamine quickly and easily, and that can interfere with your long-term goals.

This is where the idea of a “dopamine-addiction” comes from. Using social media supposedly releases dopamine, and that makes you feel good, so you keep on doing it. You become addicted.

“Dopamine-fasting,” has its root in this idea too. Dopamine fasting became popular in 2019, especially among tech workers and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. If you dopamine-fast, you eliminate pleasurable experiences, to achieve a kind of “reset” of the brain, presumably to get higher kicks afterwards. Monk mode is more moderate, in that you’re not supposed to cut out all pleasures, just pick those that contribute to your long-term goals.

This all sounds quite plausible, but the plausible idea are the ones you should be most careful with. So let’s look at what the science says.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the true story is vastly more complicated than the influencer-types want you to believe. Neuroscientists believe that dopamine is less a feel-good hormone, and more a signal that tells us what to pay attention to or what to make an effort with.

While it’s correct that dopamine plays a major role both in motivation and in learning, it turns out that dopamine is usually released in anticipation of a reward, not when the reward is received. Dopamine encodes our expectation about the future.

This was first established in a series of studies on macaque monkeys in the 1990s who showed dopamine activity when they had learned to expect that a reward was coming. Another extremely influential study in 2003 found that rats who could get heroine by pressing down a lever had a sharp spike in dopamine, before pressing it.

Studies on monkey also found that when a reward is uncertain, that releases more dopamine. This is how neurologists think gambling addictions come about: Dopamine is released in anticipation of an uncertain reward. Most people learn quickly that the reward rarely comes and stop playing. A small fraction gets hooked on the possibility of a rare reward, and those are the ones who get a problem.

It makes sense to think that some types of social media engagement also trigger this reward anticipation. And that indeed might cause a problem for some people. But how strong the effect is, differs from one person to the next, and what it does to the brain is rather unclear.

At this point you may be wondering why I talk about rats and monkeys when we’re interested in dopamine levels in the human brain. It’s because they measure those dopamine levels by implanting electrodes into the brains of those rats and monkeys, and ethics committees had issues with facebook’s proposal to do the same on humans.The best thing that scientists can do in humans is measure activity in certain brain regions that release dopamine.

One of those studies is from 2014 and used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging on 20 participants. They found that heavy social media users had more activity in a brain region that is also associated with other addictions. Then again, not all the areas typically associated with addiction lit up. And fMRIs don’t exactly have a reputation for being very accurate.

Another 2017 study used MRI scans on 50 high school students and found that excessive social media users had less grey matter in some brain areas. Loosely speaking, grey brain matter is to process information, while white brain matter is to connect different parts of the brain. Grey matter is, among other things, important for planning and impulse control, so having less grey matter is kind of not good.

In case that sounds like social media is really bad for your brain, remember that correlation is not causation. Maybe the study participants used social media more because their brains worked differently?

The best study to date on the link between social media and dopamine used positron emission tomography on 37 volunteers who also reported their smartphone usage patterns. The found that a higher proportion of social app interactions correlated with a lower capacity to produce dopamine. Yes, that’s right, a lower capacity. The authors suggest that a lower capacity to produce dopamine makes people prone to develop social media problems.

Basically, while all this talk about social media leading to a “dopamine addiction” sounds superficially plausible, I have found no scientific evidence that backs it up. Rather it seems that some people are predisposed to develop usage problems, and this predisposition is also correlated with a risk for other mental health disorders.

And then there is the question what we mean by addition anyway. Can one really get addicted to social media?

The go-to reference for mental disorders is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM for short. It assigns numbers to mental health problems. 295 point 90 for example is “Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders”.

If you see a psychiatrist, first thing they’ll do is diagnose you with a bunch of DSM numbers. I have a lot of those in my record, but I won’t tell you which, because I don’t want to discourage you from projecting your own problems on me.

The most recent version of the DSM came out in 2013 and is called DSM-5. It doesn’t have any entries for addiction. The DSM instead distinguishes between “substance abuse” and “obsessive-compulsive disorders”.

Substance abuse is basically taking drugs and ruining your life with it. Substance is hard to find on social media, unless possibly you like chewing on your phone, so I’d argue social media doesn’t lend itself to substance abuse.

An obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD for short, is any kind of behavior that negatively affects your life, but that you can’t stop. OCDs include for example eating disorders, gambling addiction, hair-pulling, hoarding, cleaning, and arranging objects.

Especially the last three are incredibly common behaviors, and I’ve seen a lot of people jokingly refer to them as their OCD, but really it’s only called a “disorder” if it negatively affects your life. I’m fond of making jokes, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, but when everyone refers to normal behaviors as disorders, I fear that the people who suffer from them won’t be taken seriously.

The DSM does not currently have an entry referring to social media use or online behavior. A group of German researchers has proposed what they call a “Social Media Use Disorder Scale for Adolescents” based on DSM-5 classifications. It’s a mix of depression, anxiety, ADHD, and OCD. But this classification has not been widely adopted.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, depression, and anxiety are often treated by cognitive-behavioral therapy, sometimes accompanied by medication. Behavioral therapy is one of the few psychotherapies that has proved beneficial in random control trials. It basically works by self-reflection and habit-building.

Monk mode looks to me like a DIY version of behavioral therapy which makes me think that it quite possibly actually works for improving your mental health, if you think there’s a problem to be fixed in the first place.

But social media use isn’t necessarily problematic, and discontinuing it has both pros and cons. A 2020 study found that users who quit social media reported an increase in meaningful interactions with friends and family and higher levels of focus and happiness. However, many of them also reported drawbacks, primarily a lack of networking opportunities, and some felt disconnected or out of touch with the world around them.

This is to say, just because some people say they benefit from monk mode doesn’t mean it’s generally beneficial. It more likely means they had a problem that needed fixing in the first place. Though if you’re watching videos about it, there’s probably a reason for that, so.

In summary. There’s no evidence that social media use has any particular impact on your dopamine levels, and neither “dopamine addiction” nor “dopamine fasting” has any scientific backup. If you feel like you’re spending too much time on social media, then maybe it’s worth giving it a try. But if you’re seriously distressed, please don’t lock yourself up in a room, get professional help. DIY is all well and fine, but it has its limit.

Many thanks to Joshua Berke and Michael Treadway for helping with this video. Any remaining blunders are exclusively mine. The biggest problem I have with social media are particle physicists, and they’d miss me if I wasn’t around I’m sure, so I don’t think I’m going to try it. How about you? Let me know in the comments.