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Social Media Rewires Your Brain And It’s Serious

Innocent scrolling could be harming you a lot more than you think.

Chloé Garnham
4 min readOct 14, 2022
Gilles Lambert on Unsplash

Can’t stop scrolling?

You’re not alone.

330 million people worldwide likely suffer from social media addiction.

69% of adults use social media daily.

And for teens, that figure is 81%.

It’s no accident. Addiction is baked into the design of social media.

But even if you don’t fit the definition of addiction, social media could still be changing your brain.

Social media intentionally impacts your brain

Plenty of ex-company employees will tell you what it’s like to work on the inside.

And it’s not a secret anymore that social media was and is designed to be addictive.

“Behind every screen on your phone, there are generally like literally a thousand engineers that have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting”. — Aza Raskin (designer of the infinite scroll)

Facebook’s founding president, Sean Parker, says they were exploiting human psychology in development but decided to proceed anyway.

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Chloé Garnham
Chloé Garnham

Written by Chloé Garnham

Personal development, philosophy, books, & mindfulness. An imperfect person on a journey to a more peaceful life. wisewordsbychloe.substack.com/

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