Having recently been diagnosed with ADHD I’ve taken part in several classes on ADHD to learn more about it. And the consensus is that no external factors like that cause ADHD. However, I’m sure this topic of algorithm driven addictive short form videos for a very young audience is being studied more now than ever so who knows what the consensus on that will be in the future. Causing ADHD or not, I don’t think it’s healthy either way.
Yeah it can certainly cause problems, it’s just not ADHD.
ADHD doesn’t even really mean short attention spans, it’s more of the inability to willingly direct attention. It’s the same way people incorrectly use “OCD” to mean liking things clean and/or orderly.
I have ADHD and I’ve had times where I’ve done the same thing for 14 hours straight (even forgetting to eat) when my brain decides it wants to latch onto that thing. You just need to be sufficiently stimulated, hence why stimulants can work as a treatment.
ADHD doesn’t even really mean short attention spans, it’s more of the inability to willingly direct attention. It’s the same way people incorrectly use “OCD” to mean liking things clean and/or orderly.
Both of these are the product of needing constant stimulation. I understand your point that hyper-focus is also part of ADD/ADHD, and I certainly am not going to make claims about how your brain is changing structurally without evidence behind it.
So this is mere conjecture for a mechanism:
What these apps (with short format video being the worst) do is train your brain to expect a constant stream of dopamine hits. Novelty (presumably even trash novelty like TikTok) triggers dopamine, your brain becomes dependent on that steady stream of dopamine fix, and your body starts craving it once you remove that pattern of behavior.
This is very similar to ADHD, which is also strongly connected to problems with how dopamine is regulated. It’s not as simple as just not enough dopamine or poor uptake or whatever, but it’s reasonably clear that it plays a role.
So both cases are a result of poor dopamine regulation causing a need for stimulation that has a negative impact on ability to function from day to day. They’re probably at minimum relatively similar.
So, perhaps ‘essentially cause ADHD’ is a bit strong, but there are absolutely studies that show that exposure to / addiction to short form video content impair focus, cause/exacerbate attention deficits, cause/exacerbate difficulty maintaining attention, as well as impair the ability to study and perform academically, worsen overall mental health etc.
Oh, and short form video content is also found to be addictive as well.
In fairness, this study does find that negative self perception and self objectification increase with viewing either short or long form video content or images featuring ‘ideal’ women, which makes sense, as this sort of thing has been long studied before ‘social media’ even existed (TV, Magazines, Movies, etc).
So, while objectification and body image problems from media exposure are not new, the proliferation and exposure amount are increased dramatically in the age of widespread social media.
I would be willing to bet that had a similar study as this one been done on boys/men it would show similar results.
Please link source, interested in reading.
Having recently been diagnosed with ADHD I’ve taken part in several classes on ADHD to learn more about it. And the consensus is that no external factors like that cause ADHD. However, I’m sure this topic of algorithm driven addictive short form videos for a very young audience is being studied more now than ever so who knows what the consensus on that will be in the future. Causing ADHD or not, I don’t think it’s healthy either way.
Yeah it can certainly cause problems, it’s just not ADHD.
ADHD doesn’t even really mean short attention spans, it’s more of the inability to willingly direct attention. It’s the same way people incorrectly use “OCD” to mean liking things clean and/or orderly.
I have ADHD and I’ve had times where I’ve done the same thing for 14 hours straight (even forgetting to eat) when my brain decides it wants to latch onto that thing. You just need to be sufficiently stimulated, hence why stimulants can work as a treatment.
Both of these are the product of needing constant stimulation. I understand your point that hyper-focus is also part of ADD/ADHD, and I certainly am not going to make claims about how your brain is changing structurally without evidence behind it.
So this is mere conjecture for a mechanism:
What these apps (with short format video being the worst) do is train your brain to expect a constant stream of dopamine hits. Novelty (presumably even trash novelty like TikTok) triggers dopamine, your brain becomes dependent on that steady stream of dopamine fix, and your body starts craving it once you remove that pattern of behavior.
This is very similar to ADHD, which is also strongly connected to problems with how dopamine is regulated. It’s not as simple as just not enough dopamine or poor uptake or whatever, but it’s reasonably clear that it plays a role.
So both cases are a result of poor dopamine regulation causing a need for stimulation that has a negative impact on ability to function from day to day. They’re probably at minimum relatively similar.
So, perhaps ‘essentially cause ADHD’ is a bit strong, but there are absolutely studies that show that exposure to / addiction to short form video content impair focus, cause/exacerbate attention deficits, cause/exacerbate difficulty maintaining attention, as well as impair the ability to study and perform academically, worsen overall mental health etc.
Oh, and short form video content is also found to be addictive as well.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144929X.2022.2151512
https://www.cell.com/heliyon/fulltext/S2405-8440(24)06377-1
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9127725/
In summary, brain rot.
Theres also studies which show, hilariously, that a good amount of mental health ‘advice’ on such short form content platforms is garbage.
This one studies the top posts on ADHD and finds half of them to be misleading.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/07067437221082854
And to round it out, heres a study on negative body image perception and self objectification amongst girls/women by short form content:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1740144523000876?via%3Dihub
In fairness, this study does find that negative self perception and self objectification increase with viewing either short or long form video content or images featuring ‘ideal’ women, which makes sense, as this sort of thing has been long studied before ‘social media’ even existed (TV, Magazines, Movies, etc).
So, while objectification and body image problems from media exposure are not new, the proliferation and exposure amount are increased dramatically in the age of widespread social media.
I would be willing to bet that had a similar study as this one been done on boys/men it would show similar results.