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Adolescence is an exquisitely sensitive time in the brain’s development. “The brain is so sensitive to social cues, to the sense of belonging, to rewards, to peers,” says neuroscientist Eva Telzer, who co-directs a tech and teen development center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In the past few years she and her colleagues have gotten a close look at how problematic social media use shapes the developing brain. For a 2024 study, she and her colleagues spent two years following 103 sixth and seventh graders on the cusp of puberty. They assessed students’ addictionlike social media use at each check-in, then scanned their brains while they completed a task that simulates receiving a social punishment or reward.

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Twelve-step recovery programs are free and accessible, making them a good (and often the only) option for many people. But doctors and therapists who treat drug and behavioral addictions have been steadily shifting away from sobriety to emphasize gradual progress and a reduction of harm instead. “I don’t think abstinence is a realistic goal for a lot of people,” says Joshua Grubbs, who studies behavioral addictions at the University of New Mexico. He notes that, especially when it comes to behavioral addictions such as those to sex or technology, focusing on sobriety can cause fixation and a cycle of shame.

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Ashley Gearhardt, who studies and treats food addiction at the University of Michigan, points out that social media fulfills our base need for socialization in the same way that ultraprocessed products fulfill our need for food. “It looks like something we need to survive, like social affiliation or calories,” Gearhardt says. But it has been deconstructed and reassembled into something optimized for maximum consumption and the producer’s profit, she says. It’s also hardest to resist in the times we need that willpower the most—don’t go to the grocery store while hungry, and don’t scroll while lonely.

Read the whole story (subscription may be required): Scientific American