HIJACKED BRAINS –
March 22, 2024 – Teenagers are inundated with notifications, with one study estimating they get 237 pings a day. “Smartphones and social media fundamentally changed the way teens spend their time outside of school,” says Jean Twenge, a psychologist and author of “Generations.
“You take a generation of young people, they’re spending a lot more times in their rooms, alone, not sleeping, not hanging out with their friends in person. That’s a pretty bad formula for mental health.”
By the numbers: While the teen mental health crisis was slowly developing in the early 2000s, it rapidly worsened in the mid-2010s — which was also when teens’ smartphone and social media usage spiked, Jonathan Haidt, the NYU professor, notes in his forthcoming book “The Anxious Generation.”
