“The more time I spend on social media, the harder it is to keep away from it. Is that something that could be affecting my depression?”
As a psychiatrist, I’ve seen variations of this question from patients countless times, and it reflects a growing problem. Something major is changing on social media that could be impacting your mental health: the rise of generative AI (GenAI).
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What Is AI-Generated Content on Social Media?
GenAI is a type of artificial intelligence. While it’s used for things like creating chatbots or targeted ads, there’s a new, more concerning use: blending AI-generated, or synthetic, content directly into your social media feeds. This technology analyzes everything about you — your likes, dislikes and viewing habits –to build hyper-personalized feeds made of computer-generated text, images or videos. This custom content is engineered to perfectly match your interests and keep your attention for as long as possible.
How Does AI Content Hook Your Brain?
When you scroll through these personalized feeds, the content activates your brain’s reward system, which is driven by dopamine, a brain chemical associated with the feeling of reward.
While studies on AI content are still emerging, research on traditional personalized feeds shows they act like a slot machine. You keep scrolling because you expect that next unpredictable, rewarding post. This mirrors the brain activity involved in gambling, which drives you to use social media more and more. Experts call this compulsive scrolling.
However, a key distinction with traditional feeds is that user generated content produces connection to real people. Users check their feeds because of the people that matter to them. An emerging concern is that synthetic feeds, tailored with greater precision to preferences, could hook attention and maximize reward in new ways, further driving scrolling.
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What are the Real Mental Health Risks of Excessive Social Media Use?
There’s a worry that these synthetic feeds could create a fake relationship with the content, making it feel hyper-personal and possibly leading you to withdraw from real-life interactions. This is a new area, and research is still catching up to prove these effects.
However, we already have strong evidence about the risks of traditional social media on mental health. A technical report from the American Academy of Pediatrics on children and adolescent digital media usage highlights how social media algorithms are designed to engage, increasing exposure to emotionally relevant content which can reinforce compulsive checking, emotional reactivity and difficulty disengaging.
Mental health risks such as anxiety or depression in children and adolescents can be associated with problematic social media usage (e.g. risky, excessive or impulsive use of social media associated with negative outcomes in everyday functioning). Research also shows it’s a vicious cycle: People who are struggling with their mental health often turn to social media to feel better, but it ends up making them feel worse.
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Expert-Recommended Ways to Reduce Problematic Scrolling Habits
Given these dynamics, practical takeaways when it comes to the mental health effects of social media mean more than just thinking about time limits, but also how you spend that time and why.
Consider these practical tips:
— Develop awareness of emotional triggers to social media use. Are you bored? Stressed? Upset? Think about what makes you default to scrolling.
— Identify ways to cope with unwanted feelings instead of scrolling. For instance, could you reach out and talk to a friend instead? Take a walk? Work on a hobby?
— Focus on changes that reduce environmental triggers. Examples include disabling non-essential notifications or keeping distance from your phone during times you’re most likely to scroll, such as at bedtime.
— Break automatic patterns. If you realize that you might fall down a rabbit hole of personalized feeds, try setting a timer for how long you use social media. Or log-out of apps so that you have to take the time to deliberately log back in, which creates a behavioral interrupt to scrolling behavior.
The goal is to make what might be an immersive and automatic experience more of an intentional choice, a critical step in improving mental health in an increasingly personalized digital world.
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How AI-Generated Content Feeds Affect Your Mental Health originally appeared on usnews.com