What Will Happen to Your Brain When You Stay Away from Social Media?

Well, let’s say we take a break from social media for a while. So we went into a kind of social media detox. How has our life changed? And how would our brains be affected by this?

Enter, let’s see.

In fact, many of us spend too much time on social media, even though we don’t realize it.

So much so that Oxford University Press chose it as the word of the year for 2024 to draw attention to this issue. “brain rot”What did he choose? But social media taps into the brain’s reward system so successfully that it’s not easy to show the will to withdraw.

According to addiction medicine specialist Anna Lembke, digital media addiction is a person’s It’s like being addicted to alcohol or cigarettes. Every like, comment, or cute cat video triggers a surge of dopamine, the brain’s “feel-good” chemical.

However, the human brain is an organ designed to maintain dopamine balance. Just as like a seesaw mechanism. The endless scrolling eventually disrupts this balance, calling on the brain to compensate for this deficiency by producing less dopamine or slowing transmission.

What needs to be done at this point is to press the “pause” button on this dopamine cycle triggered by social media and allow the brain to classify the reward pathways.

To help reorganize the brain’s reward pathways Social media should be avoided whenever possible. According to experts, this period is at least 4 weeks. But even short breaks have a huge impact on improving mental health.

For example, in a study conducted on 65 young people between the ages of 10 and 19, when they stayed away from social media for 3 days, these people their self-esteem and self-compassion increased was seen.

Of course, once you decide to stay away from social media, it will not be an easy process.

The brain will try to adapt to lower dopamine levels and withdrawal symptoms such as anxiety remains to be seen. However, enduring these unbearable and uncomfortable feelings for a while will allow the brain’s reward pathways to be restarted and the cycle of desire and consumption to be stopped.

Eventually the desire to engage in social media will stop and the ongoing as dopamine hits disappear It will be much easier to get through the day.

In addition to reorganizing the brain’s reward pathways, taking a temporary break from social media relationship with social media platforms It will make each of us more conscious about it.

So we take this time to step back and look at what we’re doing on social media and by realizing whether it benefits us or not. we can use it. As a result, let’s not forget to say that the human brain is negatively affected by endless scrolling and social media.

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