Addiction to social networks. Here’s how to try disconnecting from Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok

Are we all addicted to social media? We asked the professor Luigi Gallimberti, doctor specializing in Psychiatry and Toxicology and former professor at the University of Padua, who immediately clarifies the current situation as a scientist, that is, starting from the data: “Since 2011, since the birth of social networks, adolescents and pre-adolescents have always become more anxious, more depressed and suffer more from eating disorders ». The data show that in the last 10 years the growth of this type of disorders – in this age group – has been 140%. An impressive increase, but that’s not all. «More and more pre-adolescents and adolescents – continues the professor – neglect the study, prefer to stay at home rather than play or go out in company, suffer from drowsiness, get annoyed at all and have an altered diet and sleep cycle. The situation is potentially devastating ».

Professor Gallimberti does not go lightly, as he has a lot of experience with drug addiction. We then ask him if the same applies to adults and he tells us that the risk exists, but children’s brains are much more fragile and can suffer much more severe damage. In general the situation is dramatic and all the alarm bells are ringing: greater isolation, moodiness, alteration of the sensation of time and distance between real and virtual. Sometimes we also realize it, we know we are wasting time, because if social networks are precious tools of communication, work, information, vice versa many times they are a filler that, once the phone is put down, they leave a sense of emptiness.

“The smartphone involves neuroplastic alterations that reading, for example, puts it back in its place »explains the professor. But how does it work? What happens to our brain when we use social networks? “In nature there is pleasure, activated by dopamine, and there is happiness, which is felt when neurons release serotonin.” Sometimes we confuse them but pleasure and happiness are very different emotions, “pleasure is never enough and is used alone. It has always existed and it is useful for creating habits: living beings have been able to evolve thanks to the release of dopamine which makes eating, drinking and reproducing rewarding. Happiness came later and is proper to Homo Sapiens ».

Very serious studies, the professor tells us, show that in the last 30 years people have declared themselves more and more dissatisfied and less and less happy. The release of serotonin in favor of dopamine is stimulated less and less, “but if you stimulate something that leads to being alone, the other neurotransmitter will be less and less stimulated.” And that’s not all. Using social networks too much takes away our sleep more and more, which is instead fundamental as food and water because it is while we sleep that it is done in our brain “: this operation takes 10-12 hours a day in children, 8- 9 in adolescents and approximately 8 in adults. “A healthy brain is a clean brain that can wait because it knows what is useful and what could be harmful. This is important to say because we must not always give everything to children immediately, we must strengthen their neurons of concentration, awareness, the ability to control desire ». Smartphones are a shortcut, they use specific algorithms to stimulate the dopaminergic system to make a profit, as Frances Hogen, a former Facebook manager after she quit her job, reported last October. “We are going to crash, as a society, because of the lack of sleep and to compensate we try exciting, which is even worse ».

We started with this question put to Professor Gallimberti «What can we do to stop ours addiction to social networks? », But we only got to the answer at the end. And rightly so, because being aware of the why and the severity of this addiction can be an incentive to improve. And the answer is simple: «It is true for children, but not only: you have to sleep, you have to learn the art of waitingremain physically active and you have to read the printed paper at least an hour a day ».