‘Body Electric’ examines the link between social media and depression rates

A MARTNEZ, HOST:

Last week we told you about the 41 states suing Meta for allegedly making products that addicted teens and worsened their mental health. Today we hear a lot about researchers studying the psychological effects of time spent online, but what impact can this information overload and doom scrolling have on our physical health? TED Radio Hour host Manoush Zomorodi weighed in on this question for the latest episode of NPR’s special series, Body Electric. Manoush, what did you find on this?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI, BYLINE: Yeah. So, A, we’ve been hearing for years about the connection between social media and increased rates of depression and anxiety, particularly among teenage girls. So in 2021, thousands of teenagers began experiencing Tourette’s-like symptoms, seemingly out of nowhere. A Chicago neurologist, Caroline Olvera, told us she used to treat teenagers with tics, but what she saw in her office this time was different.

CAROLINE OLVERA: What we have started to see is that women aged 18 to 19 arrive with a sudden onset of very violent, very severe tics, for which they have had to go to the emergency room.

ZOMORODI: So, A, teenagers were twitching (ph) violently – this was happening all over the world. And just as mysteriously, within a few months, the symptoms disappeared almost as quickly as they appeared. Eventually, the outbreak was traced to a series of videos about verbal and physical tics that were all over TikTok. So it’s not as if contagious behaviors are new. Experts sometimes refer to them as mass psychogenic illnesses, and they have been documented throughout the ages. There was the French dancing plague of 1518, in 1962 a laughter epidemic in Tanzania. But this epidemic, thanks to social networks, has spread faster and further. And unsurprisingly, those affected were mostly young women with a history of depression or anxiety.

MARTNEZ: Any idea why these teenagers and not others?

ZOMORODI: So the researchers hypothesized that going through adolescence during a pandemic and spending a lot of time online was a sort of perfect storm. Much research is therefore carried out more generally to try to understand mental health and its links with the body. I spoke to psychiatrist and neuroscientist Sahib Khalsa of the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Okla. He studies how people read the signals their body sends them, or what’s called interoceptive awareness.

SAHIB KHALSA: So interoception is a process by which the nervous system detects, interprets and integrates information about the state of the inside of your body. So if I asked you to tell me if you’re breathing fast or hungry, you could easily tune in to your body and tell me how you feel.

ZOMORODI: But Sahib says some of us struggle to deal with all the feelings we feel when we go online – the outrage, the anger, the sadness, the shock, the fear and the wonder – to the point that Sahib says many of us feel physically bombarded.

KHALSA: So maybe someone who feels everything intensely, maybe what they need to learn is how to ignore or at least live with the feeling, realize that it’s just a natural part of his body. It’s not something to fear.

MARTNEZ: Very good. So what can we do to deal with all this noise in our lives?

ZOMORODI: Yeah. Sahib therefore suggests that we all give ourselves a regular sensory reset. So if you can, for about 45 minutes, lie in a dark room, without music or lights, and just try to let your mind and muscles relax as much as possible. And he says doing this regularly is key to managing anxiety and information overload. I mean, A, we restart our laptops every once in a while. Well, we humans need it too.

MARTNEZ: All right, this is Manoush Zomorodi, host of the TED Radio Hour and the Body Electric special series. And to learn more about the relationship between our technology and our bodies, visit the TED Radio Hour podcast feed or npr.org/bodyelectric.

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