What can help break social media addiction? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Rewards that activate pleasure centers in our brains are baked into social media platforms, and that can be a recipe for addiction. That’s according to Carol Vidal, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins and author of a recent study looking at social media use and depression.

Vidal: Especially since the pandemic, isolated at home and there was not a lot of rewarding things to do, there was an increase in eating disorders and more social media use among kids. The things that cause us to feel rewarded, to socialize and to eat feel good, right? There's actually a lot of 12 step programs for behavioral addictions, behavioral patterns that are the same as actions for substance use except for that you're not using substances you're using behaviors that are rewarding in the short term, but that they could potentially cause you to have high consequences in the long term.    :31

Vidal says social media use isn’t yet recognized as an addiction disorder but says ongoing research may well provide evidence for such a designation. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.