How Does Social Media Affect The Brain

Social media is a part of life for most people. It wasn’t too long ago when social media was introduced, but now has grown to many different cultures and age groups. You can walk down the street and see a six year old snapchatting her friends. Social media can take a toll on a lot of people’s life and can really influence what you say, eat, wear, or feel, which affects the brain in many ways. In order to understand how social media can affect the brain, it is necessary to examine the negative effects of social media on brain, positive effects of social media on the brain and lifestyle, and how they both can affect the brain and change the way people live. Social media can have a toll on your emotions and can make you feel lonely or can impact

Also it can help with preventing suicide and offer help for people who feel that burden. Many people skip over the ads to get on with what they were doing, but it can take one ad to convince someone to change their ways for the better. Many people agree that social media can cause stress with the number of likes, or anything else but you can turn off notifications or make them go off at certain times and/or for certain things(“Work for Mental Health”). This could be a good thing to learn about your stress so you can learn to cope with it instead of making it

32 teen’s brains were scanned as if using social media, and researchers from UCLA found that when the teens saw images and the likes the pictures were getting were activating certain parts of the brain and the teens got almost resembling a reward(East). We all feel the reward of getting a high number of likes and that makes us feel happy, but social media likes shouldn’t make us happy. The amount of grey matter, part of brain responsible for controlling emotions, your brain has is based on how many friends on social media you have. Dr Kanai said, “ Some brain regions are based on how many friends, real and virtual, we have,”(Fontein). The grey matter also reacts on how many likes we get and gives the sense of reward for number of likes and for number of friends. All of that stress affects our brain and makes it worn out for learning to give us a sense of happiness at the wrong