The 4 Foundational Harms of The Anxious Generation

The 4 Foundational Harms of The Anxious Generation

Last Updated on October 29, 2024

Mental health of kids and teens has been in free fall since the early 2010s. The rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm are at all-time high, and after much research and debate we know why: the mental health epidemic started with the arrival of smartphones. What did the screens do to the kids? Nobody summarized the findings better than social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his bestselling book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

The central idea of the book is that phones changed the very nature of childhood – from healthy play-based childhood to unnatural phone-based one. Haidt describes how this “great rewiring of childhood” has disrupted kids’ normal brain development, resulting in what he calls Four Foundational Harms: 

Social Deprivation, Sleep Deprivation, Attention Fragmentation, and Addiction.

Harm #1: Social Deprivation

Social skills are built through face-to-face communication, physically spending time with other people. Social media is a poor substitute, depriving the kids of social development their brains are wired for, as well as benefits of human connection, which is essential for well-being. The research outlined in Jean Twenge’s book iGen showed that teens’ use of social media not only correlates with depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders – it is the actual cause of their suffering.

Real-world social interactions are the building blocks of mental health because they are:

  • Face-to-face – with a full range of non-verbal communication and empathy
  • Synchronous – happening in real time
  • Embodied – physically together with others, not alone with the screen
  • Physical – the benefit of physical presence and touch, and sensory experience of the world

Screen-based communication is solitary, asynchronous, disembodied, and virtual. It deprives adolescents of social and sensory inputs that the brain needs to be healthy. Phone-based childhood clashes with the evolutionary biology of the brain. Exploring the real world together with friends who care about you is very different from sitting alone in your room consuming endless feeds and waiting for social validation from an ever-changing cast of online strangers. One delivers psychological benefits, the other only psychological harms – and yet it consumes all of our kids’ time.

Sadly, even when teens are physically together, they might just be texting from across the room, ignoring and depriving each other of their human presence. Phones take priority, destroying the quality of social interaction. Once the phone comes out, the message is clear: you are not that important to me. The resulting feeling of isolation that young people experience wrecks havoc on their sense of self. They may be connected to the entire world, but they are lonely.

Harm #2: Sleep Deprivation

Teens get less sleep than they need (9 hours according to research), because the sleep cycles shift in adolescence – most teens become night owls, going to bed late. But school still starts early, so they can’t sleep in. Sleep deprived teens cannot focus, their grades suffer, and their emotional regulation, which is usually not great in immature humans, breaks down completely.

Not a good situation to begin with – now add smartphones into the mix. Phones are loaded with distractions that entice teens to scroll later and later into the night, on the screen glowing with blue light that disrupt the production of melatonin, a natural sleep hormone. Consuming highly stimulating (and often disturbing) content instead of sleeping, children end up wired and tired. The next day they are exhausted, irritable, unable to focus, falling asleep in class.

Chronic sleep deprivation is directly linked to mental health problems. It is obvious why: when the brain does not get the rest and recovery it needs, it breaks down. Sleep deprivation has been on the rise since 2013 – just about the time when teens started sleeping with their phone in the bedroom. Depression and anxiety followed suit.

Research shows that sleep deprivation also leads to behavior problems – such as aggression and impulsivity. During puberty, the brain is changing rapidly, and sleep is more important than ever. Screen-related lack of sleep disrupts healthy brain wiring during the time of critical cognitive development, and is a major contributor to the mental health epidemic.

Harm #3: Attention Fragmentation

Notifications – from social media, messengers, video games, breaking news, celebrity gossip, trivial updates about the lives of a thousand online “friends”. The phones ping and vibrate. A heavy user – like teen girls – gets interrupted almost every minute. There is a fierce competition for the limited resource of adolescent attention, because it translates to billions of dollars. Tech companies care little about what attention fragmentation does to focus and productivity, sleep and relationships.

Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, wrote about the lost art of concentrating on doing just one thing, and thinking deeply. Instead of reading a book, we jump between hyperlinks, our ability to focus and reflect compromised by the stream of distractions. We all became shallow. Adults can’t help it, but for an adolescent it is far harder to stay focused because of their immature prefrontal cortex and limited ability to say no to a million temptations on their screens. Capturing attention is the number one goal of app designers, who use their knowledge of dark psychology to do so. It is especially easy to manipulate the young.

Fragmentation of attention permanently rewires an adolescent brain, and damages teens’ ability to think. It appears that young people today are suffering from a self-inflicted form of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which is not biological but environmental in nature. Heavy media multitasking causes attention problems, and impairs executive function. Self-control, focus, ability to make plans and resist temptations – never fully develop. 

Stuck in perpetual adolescence, the child never becomes a functional adult.

Harm #4: Addiction

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter involved in feelings of pleasure and pain. The release of dopamine feels good, sending a signal to the brain: “do more of this!”. Being on the screen feels like an endless stream of dopamine hits – and just like the drugs, it is addictive.

The pleasure a gambling addict feels at the win does not cause them to take their winnings and go home – it causes them to gamble more. It is the same with social media, video games, and other digital media – they are behavioral addictions that involve dopamine, leading to cravings and compulsive use – by design.

Stanford professor BJ Fogg used to teach a course titled Persuasive Technology about applying behaviorist techniques of animal training to humans, using intermittent (variable) rewards to achieve compulsive use. Random rewards is the key discovery of behaviorist psychology, and it is used to devastating effect in slot machines – and in smartphones – to create lasting addictions. Mike Krieger, the founder of Instagram, was one of Fogg’s students. He and others in the tech industry used the research to hack the reward circuits in the brain, and manipulate user behavior to maximize screen time. Today, Professor Fogg is teaching behavioral design to help people reduce their screen addictions.

Operant conditioning, as taught by BF Skinner in the 1940s, would make a lab rat tap on the lever obsessively. Smartphones follow the same steps to addiction: they start with external triggers: a notification promises something interesting, which spikes dopamine and prompts the user to action, which feels great, and makes the user pick up the phone again and again looking for the next “fix”. There are no natural stopping points to the infinite scrolls within the apps. As the dopamine-filled brain craves the random rewards, the trigger to use the phone becomes internal, and the user is hooked.

In her book Dopamine Nation, the addiction researcher Anna Lembke explains how digital addiction works. The brain adapts itself to elevated levels of dopamine and reduces the amount of dopamine produced to maintain homeostasis – pleasure-pain balance. In response, the user increases the dosage of the digital “drug” consumed to get the pleasure back – until nothing feels good anymore. Anhedonia sets in – inability to derive pleasure from anything, on the screen or in real life. Sounds like clinical depression. Because it is.

Call to Action: Less Screens, More Play

What is there to be done to save the young from these 4 foundational harms? Haidt recommends the solution that sounds simple enough: less screens, more play. If we pull together as a society, we can limit the negative effects of toxic screens, and fix our kids’ brains by reverting to healthier real-life activities of what childhood used to be before the arrival of smartphones.

We are under protective in the digital world, and overprotective in the real world. To help the kids, we should do it the other way around.

Less Screens

Less screens is easier said than done. This requires collective action from the tech industry, the government, schools, and parents. Needless to say, the tech industry is not interested in screen time reduction when its business model depends on screen time maximization. The government is slow to act, and beset by corrupt industry lobbying, so any legislation is usually decades behind needed consumer protection – just think of car safety or big tobacco. Schools are reluctant to fight with kids and parents to remove the sacred right to phones. What if there is a school shooting?! And how convenient it is when students can google correct answers and get good test scores? As for parents, we are busy, tired, and stressed, and many of us are not well informed about the dangers of phones to kids’ mental health. Besides, “electronic babysitting” is the guaranteed way to get the kids to be quiet.

More Play

More Play is about the opportunity cost of phones: what the kids are NOT doing while they stare at their screens. Negative mental health effects of phones are not just about the damaging content on the screen – it is about most waking hours spent NOT playing, NOT socializing face-to-face, NOT moving, NOT processing reality. The brain is not designed to operate this way – that’s why the second half of the solution offered by Dr. Haidt is to fill the void left by phones with healthy real life activities.

Schools should remove the phones not just from the classroom, but from breaks, recess, lunch, sports, and field trips, to create the space in which teens can learn to build their social skills and resolve their relationship issues in synchronous face-to-face communication, like humans did for thousands of years. Younger kids should be given free reign of the playground without parents’ or teachers’ interference, and allowed to walk places by themselves without anyone calling the police for child neglect.

We should give our young more freedom and less supervision in the real world – how else can they build their sense of agency? When kids and teens are given a chance to deal with reality and solve problems on their own, they develop confidence and self-control. And when they start to feel competent, they are no longer fragile.

The anxious generation would heal itself.

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