Can Social Media Change the Teen Brain?

Quick Answer: Yes, social media use can lead to changes in the structure and function of the teen brain, according to new research.

Key Points:

• Rates of suicidality and depression have increased dramatically among teens over the past 10-15 years
• Close to half of all teens say they’re online all the time
• fMRI data shows associations between social media use and changes in the areas of the teen brain related to how they decide what’s important, what they like, how they make decisions, and how they regulate emotion.

For details from the latest, peer-reviewed studies, see the full article below.

Social Media and Teen Mental Health: What Do We Really Know?

There’s a million-dollar, unanswered question in the field of youth mental health, and the answer – if and when we get a definitive one – will affect millions of children, teens, and young adults in the U.S.:

What’s the real impact of social media on the teen brain?

Expert opinions on the topic vary. Some sidestep the question and blame social media for virtually every psychological, academic, or emotional problem that 21^st century teens experience. Others point to studies that show a weak correlation between social media use and teen depression for specific subsets of teens and extrapolate that to include all teens. Still others take the middle road. They offer a nuanced interpretation of the existing data, which shows that some types of use and some types of behavior increase risk for some negative outcomes for some teens.

To learn more about the relationship between social media and mental health, please navigate to our blog and these articles:

Does Social Media Harm Teen Mental Health?

Social Media, Teens, Young Adults: How Can We Improve Online Health?

We also encourage you to read this article on a related topic also addresses similar questions:

Screen Time at Bedtime: What’s the Impact on Kids and Early Adolescents?

In this article, we’ll drill down on evidence presented in a recent study called “Social Media and Adolescent Health” published in 2024 by The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.  The study originates from a working committee of the national academies formed to answer a broad range of questions related to social media and teen health.

Social Media and the Teen Brain: What Can This Study Tell Us?

While the scope of both the study and report are broad, we’ll focus on the primary question the working committee posed:

“In what ways, if any, does social or digital media affect the mental and physical health and well-being of adolescents and children (age 13–18 years), including anxiety, depression, addiction and self-efficacy, social isolation, relationship malformation, relationship with their parents, life satisfaction, and physical activity?”

Within that question, we’ll focus on mental and physical health, with specific attention to the changes social media may cause in the teen brain. What interests us, for the purposes of this article – and what the study can share – is exactly how social media might change the teen brain, and what impact those changes might have on teen behavior, mental health, and overall wellbeing.

First, let’s take a look at the developments in teen mental health over the past decade that cause concern in parents, providers, and policymakers, and result in a nationwide research effort to untangle the complex relationship between social media and mental health.

Teen Mental Health: Alarming Trends

We collected the following data from the 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (2023 YRBS) published by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The 2023 YRBS is an important publication because it includes long-term data trends that help give us perspective and context for the current data and our current circumstances. The first of data set we’ll look at addresses depressive symptoms related to clinical diagnosis of major depressive disorder (MDD). Teens answered this question:

During the past 12 months, did you ever feel so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that you stopped doing some usual activities?

Here’s what they said:

• By Year:
  • 2011: 28.5%
  • 2021: 42%

47% increase over 10 years

• By Gender:
  • Male: 29%
  • Female: 57%
• By race/ethnicity:
  • American Indian or Alaska Native: 40%
  • Asian: 35%
  • Black: 39%
  • Hispanic: 46%
  • Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander: 39%
  • White: 41%
  • Multiracial: 49%
• By Sexual identity*:
  • Heterosexual: 35%
  • LGBQ+: 69%

Next, we’ll look at the data from the YRBS on suicide attempts. Participants answered the following question:

During the past 12 months, how many times did you actually attempt suicide?

The research team recorded any answer of one or more as a “yes” for the purposes of statistical analysis and simplicity of presentation.

Attempted Suicide in the Past Year

• By Year:
  • 2011: 8%
  • 2021: 10%

25% increase over 10 years

• By Sex:
  • Male: 7%
  • Female: 13%
• By race/ethnicity:
  • American Indian or Alaska Native: 16%
  • Asian: 6%
  • Black: 14%
  • Hispanic: 11%
  • Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander: 10%
  • White: 9%
  • Multiracial: 12%
• By Sexual identity:
  • Heterosexual: 6%
  • LGBQ+: 22%

When we consider those two sets of data side-by-side, then recognize that the rapid uptake of smartphone and social media use mirrors the rapid increases in suicidality and depressive symptoms among teens in the past decade (+3 years), we understand why it’s tempting to believe social media is the reason behind what experts call the youth mental health crisis.

However, to understand if social media contributes to the crisis, we need to understand two things:

1. Whether social media can change the brain.
2. Whether those changes are related to mental health.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the details in the Social Media and Adolescents report we introduce and link to above.

Can Social Media Change the Teen Brain?

The medical, scientific, and psychiatric communities have an extensive understanding of the human brain and how it develops. In humans, adolescence is a time of significant and dramatic change. Teens change physically, emotionally, cognitively, and socially. The teen brain undergoes changes in three key areas that are directly related to issues raised by social media use:

1. Sensitivity to reward
2. Maturation of executive function and cognitive control systems
3. Sensitivity to specific categories of social information

Now let’s look at the data on teen brain development presented in the study:

• A significant proportion of adolescent brain development happens in the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain essential for logic, planning, memory, and abstract thinking.
• Executive function, i.e. brain processes associated with regulating time, focusing attention, managing emotion, evaluating outcomes, and managing impulses, continues to develop throughout adolescence in a process that lasts into early adulthood, ending at some point during the mid-20s.
• This asynchronous development – increases in ideas, urges, and new behaviors coupled with under-developed control mechanisms – mean adolescents are prone to taking risks and averse to limiting risk, increasing likelihood they’ll engage in risky behavior, online and offline.

This makes them more vulnerable to the negative consequences of social media use than adults or children.

• Constant engagement in social media in early adolescence can alter neural sensitivity to rewards and punishments
  • Sensitivity to rewards increases from childhood through adolescence, peaking in the late teens and then declining

With all that in mind, consider these latest developments:

• Studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) connects social media use to structural changes in adolescent and young adult neural networks
• A new publication shows watching short, personalized videos can change the structure of brain networks in young adults
• Recent fMRI studies have linked the use of social media in early adolescence with changes in the brain areas that regulate reactions to social feedback

Here’s how the authors of Social Media and Adolescent Health summarize the impact of social media use on the brain:

“While none of these studies can establish that social media use causes changes in the brain, the emerging literature suggests a potential interaction of social media stimuli and neurological development.”

We’ll translate.

What they’re saying is that the studies don’t prove unequivocally that if you do use social media your brain will change in this specific way, but rather, the evidence shows an interaction between social media use and brain development.

What Can We Do With This Data?

First, we can look at what we know about social media already:

• Spending over 3-3.5 hours a day on social media increases the risk of mental health problems, including:
  • Anxiety
  • Depression
  • low-self esteem
• Teen girls who are heavy users and engage in negative self-comparison are at highest risk of developing social media-related mental health problems, including:
  • Depression
  • Disordered eating
  • Body image issues

Next, we can cross-reference that information with what we learned from the new study, which tells us that – based on fMRI scans – engaging in social media is associated with changes in the teenage brain related to brain systems that help:

• Decide what’s important (salience)
• Decide what they like (reward)
• Prioritize social cues (executive function)
• Regulate emotional reactions to social cues (executive function)

And finally, we integrate that knowledge with this data on social media use among teens:

Percentage of Teens Online Almost Constantly (Self-Report)

• Total: 46%
• By Gender:
  • Female: 43%
  • Male: 48%
• By age:
  • 13-14: 36%
  • 15-17: 52%

When we take all those steps, and realize that over half of 15-17 year olds are online almost constantly, that more than 3.5 hours of use can increase risk of mental health problems, and that new evidence shows a clear relationship between social media use and neurological development, we conclude that when we support teens, we need to take all this information into consideration when we create a treatment plan.

It’s not just us: this study is a call to anyone involved in the lives of teens. When teens develop mental health problems, it’s now important to ask questions about the frequency, duration, and type of behavior they engage in on social media. Answers to these questions may help us support teens with mental health disorders more comprehensively and effectively.