By Maya Zubrinsky
After an especially long day, you finally get home and begin to wind down. Naturally, without even thinking, you open TikTok. You swipe through an algorithm that feeds you exactly what you are craving— instant gratification. As short-form videos go by, so do minutes, and suddenly it’s been an hour that you feel you have wasted. Yet, nothing is compelling you to stop. Why do we passively rot a brain that is capable of so much more?
Well, the answer starts with the positive feedback loop that occurs each time we like a piece of content. Similarly to gambling, when we watch a particularly entertaining video, the brain’s reward system releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter related to pleasure, making it a sort of neurological quest to seek even greater amusement potential every time we swipe past another video. It’s a form of variable reinforcement, a psychological principle positing that a behavior becomes more persistent when it is rewarded on a schedule based on randomness rather than consistency. In this case, the reward is the highly entertaining video that finally comes up after sifting through okay ones for several scrolls. Yet, this also makes the behavior very resistant to extinction; the motivation to keep scrolling is driven by the unpredictability of when we will inevitably strike gold, no matter how long it takes to actually get there. This phenomenon makes sense, as dopamine release is higher when anticipating a reward than when the reward is received.
However, the scrolling feels great as we engage with it, but it feels awful as soon as we stop. As Stanford psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke explains, “Upon signing off, the brain is plunged into a dopamine-deficit state as it attempts to adapt to the unnaturally high levels of dopamine social media just released.” This “dopamine crash” that Lembke describes often manifests as an anxious, dreadful feeling of insecurity so poignant it invades your entire internal atmosphere without control— unless, of course, you were to reopen your handheld Pandora’s Box to temporarily feed your need for stimulation. Alas, a cycle between satisfaction and disappointment endures; the downside is downregulation, where a decreased sensitivity to dopamine makes it harder to achieve the same joy from ordinary sources of pleasure.
As busy college students who grew up during the rise of social media, we often take the brunt of this phenomenon. Short-form content poses a serious threat to attention span, which in turn feeds a habit of procrastination. A 2023 study from Jin Xie and colleagues on short-form video addiction among undergraduates found that short-form video addiction had a significant positive predictive effect on academic procrastination. Due to the low-effort nature of short-form content consumption, it is easy to set aside academic tasks that require far more cognitive diligence to instead opt for something that guarantees immediate gratification. This is heightened by the fact that social media algorithms are programmed to take what we engage with and deliver content that appeals to our niche interests; this allows minimal effort to capture our attention, even if that attention should be captured by more productive endeavours. Making this behavior a habit, however, will go as far as impairing executive brain functioning, the set of regulatory cognitive skills governed by the prefrontal cortex. Yan et al. (2024) explored these long-term effects in their study, finding that frequent watching of short-form videos can suppress activity in higher-order areas responsible for self-control and attention. Thus, a habit that many would deem a trivial part of our lives is discreetly diminishing our capacity for discipline and decision-making.
Understanding the neurocognitive basis of our doomscrolling habits can help us gain insight as to why short-form content is so consuming— if only it were enough to break the addiction. Most of us don’t have the willpower to go on a digital detox either, taking an extensive break from social media altogether, cold turkey style. While limited research exists about the most effective ways to break harmful scrolling patterns, scholars agree that motivation is the strongest predictor of successful behavioral change. This means that for any difference to occur, it starts with us taking an honest reflection of our habits and developing a practical means of addressing them. Intrinsically, there must be an intentional purpose behind one’s plan in order to sustain commitment; without a meaningful goal, there can be no growth. Extrinsically, sharing progress within a social community proves beneficial, existing as a tool to hold each other accountable. It’s hard to generalize a solution when we all engage with short-form content based on different routines and pressures; however, recognizing the mechanisms both behaviorally and in the brain that shape our dependency can contribute to defining the motivation that is necessary to make real change attainable.
References
Bromberg-Martin, E. S., Matsumoto, M., & Hikosaka, O. (2010). Dopamine in motivational control: Rewarding, aversive, and alerting. Neuron, 68(5), 815–834. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2010.11.022
Goldman, B. (2021, October 29). Addictive potential of social media, explained. Stanford Medicine News Center. https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2021/10/addictive-potential-of-social-media-explained.html
Rahmillah, F. I., Tariq, A., King, M., & Oviedo-Trespalacios, O. (2023). Evaluating the effectiveness of apps designed to reduce mobile phone use and prevent maladaptive mobile phone use: Multimethod study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 25, e42541. https://doi.org/10.2196/42541
Su, C., Xue, W., Hu, Y., & Zhou, H. (2021). Viewing personalized video clips recommended by TikTok activates default mode network and ventral tegmental area: Functional heterogeneity of DMN in a recommendation-video paradigm. NeuroImage, 245, 118720. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118720
Xie, J., Xu, X., Zhang, Y., Tan, Y., Wu, D., Shi, M., & Huang, H. (2023). The effect of short-form video addiction on undergraduates’ academic procrastination: A moderated mediation model. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1298361. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1298361
Yan, T., Su, C., Xue, W., Hu, Y., & Zhou, H. (2024). Mobile phone short video use negatively impacts attention functions: An EEG study. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 18, 1383913. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2024.1383913