Addicted to Social Media? Here's How to Change Your Habits?
By: Sarah Stark
As someone who has struggled with disordered eating, I have tried — and failed — to find answers in restrictive diets. The science is clear: restrictive diets don’t work. Six years into recovery, I see familiar language cropping up in the dialogue about social media and phone “addictions” with headlines like “How a one-month phone fast changed my life!” and “Quitting social media cured my phone addiction!”
Restrictive technology detoxes seem like a recipe for disordered social media use, especially during a pandemic that forces many of our social interactions online. But maybe our phone “addictions” are disordered behaviors we can treat without restricting, cleansing or quitting technology.
To learn more, I spoke to New York-based psychology professor Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, who studies the role anxiety plays in technology use, develops digital therapeutics and advises the team for the National Day of Unplugging.
Changing the conversation
In her discussion of how digital technology affects our mental health, Dennis-Tiwary avoids the word “addiction,” but says devices are “designed to be compulsive and habit-forming.” When anxiety becomes uncomfortable, the compulsion to check notifications and engage with social media presents an easy escape.
“There’s an avoidance paradox in anxiety, which is that the more you avoid it, the more it accelerates,” she says.
Avoidance and anxiety work together in a vicious cycle. Smartphones and social media, designed with compulsivity in mind, can keep that cycle going. While our devices may not cause anxiety, they certainly work to accelerate it.
Even so, Dennis-Tiwary cautions against blaming mental health problems on social media. This kind of thinking not only misses the point, but also misses an opportunity to examine our relationship with technology.
Who we leave out
That said, advice to quit social media altogether overlooks people who rely on — and find platforms in — online communities.
“For Black communities and other communities of color, social media has been an outlet. It has been a safe space,” says Dr. Brandale Mills Cox, an Albuquerque-based market researcher who focuses on multicultural consumer markets and Black representation on screen.
Read more here.
