Social Media Addiction and Sleep
By Hunter Price
Embedded Files
Research Overview
Social media addiction, a new type of addiction consistently rising among youth populations, is easy to access and hard to escape with the increasing popularity of apps like Instagram and TikTok. Its effects are quite similar to those of far older and well-researched forms of addiction like alcoholism in that both addictions damage multiple parts of the brain, affecting emotional regulation, behavior, and sleep.
Sleep itself is incredibly important to mental and physical health. Lack of sleep is known to impair decision-making capabilities, reduce focus, and increase emotional irritability.
Typically, if someone stays up too late one night, they will tend to go to bed earlier the next night to compensate for the lost sleep. My project investigated whether this phenomenon is true in adolescents who had the option to scroll social media, play video games, or read instead of going to sleep immediately.
I hypothesized that, because lack of sleep impairs decision-making and lowers focus levels, this will cause people to turn to social media and possibly gaming just as much as the night before, because of their addictive nature. I believe that this connection will be stronger in social media than in gaming because the profit model of social media apps incentivizes them to craft and optimize their platforms entirely to addict users and make them spend as much time as possible on these platforms, unlike gaming. I do not believe that this trend will be seen in reading because reading requires significantly more focus and mental strength, and is not addictive like scrolling social media can be, so people will feel too tired to go through the effort of picking up the book and reading more late into the night.
Original Research Proposal (June 3rd, 2024)
Page updated
Report abuse