It seems when you go onto someone’s phone or your own, the little icons of a camera, a ghost, a blue  F, a little blue bird, or a music note will capture anyone’s attention because we know what they are. Social media platforms. This world has this addiction to a little brick of technology we hold in our hands. A phone, and on that we have many apps that we all might have some slight addiction too. We spend hours upon hours staring at it and scrolling through our phone. We look at it and we wait for a notification, we have this attachment that we can’t let go of. We try to find happiness in this phone or in the applications that sit on our phone. But what does that really do for us? How do the main apps someone would use on the phone, social media actually affect our lives. Because it seems that’s all our generation cares about. Having the platform, and making our lives look the coolest, or the trendy-est. We make friends, and foes, on them. It’s how our world works, it revolves around one thing: social media.

The effects that social media have on the brain is very impactful. It messes with your brain.  It takes your attention and makes giving attention and multitasking hard. Researchers have found that social media has found that a person who is heavily addicted to social media has a short attention span, and that it’s hard to ignore distractions. And their cognitive performance goes down. That is a huge deal. It has been suggested that we spend up to 30 minutes in a day on social media. But most people spend about three hours on their phone. Which means most of those hours were spent on some type of social media. When taking a poll, most teens said that they spend about three hours or more on social media or on their phone. As seen, social media does affect you, but do we notice it?

“You see things you miss out on and feel bad, or you see things that are really cool. But for the most part I feel that it has affected me in a good way. Because I am able to learn a lot from it,” senior, Kassidy Johnson said.

With social media most people are going to say that they have been affected for the good. Because we don’t want to give it a bad reputation, because it’s something so interesting that captures our attention and we want more. But when asking an older generation, their answers might be different. They might see it as a great way to connect, but they also probably have seen it affect their family in ways that aren’t always the greatest. Social media can cause harm to your mental state, and it hurts. And a lot of teens these days are struggling more than ever when it comes to our mental state. Struggling  with how we see ourselves, what we want, and then we struggle with ‘am I good enough, cool enough, pretty enough’ and those start to impact our lives because it starts to do self harm. Not physically, but emotionally.

“Once you go into social media there’s no going back. That’s what it feels like. You get to see people’s lives, and that way it’s good. And seeing how perfect their lives are is hard on me and others and it affects my mental state on how I perceive myself and others,” senior, Lauren Mun said.

We can see the pros and the cons of everything that social media does for us, from keeping us connected to people around the world, to finding new ideas. But we have to be careful because sometimes we don’t recognize what is going on in ourselves. But we must learn to take care of ourselves even when it’s hard. And others are willing to help you and there are ways to help. Even though this is the world we live in now, a world of technology, there are a lot of benefits and so use those benefits to your advantage but when it comes to important things in your life, don’t always count on it. And if the addiction becomes worse there is help.