If we’re being honest, it’s damn near impossible to stay focused when the internet is at our fingertips. There’s always one more notification to read, one more deal to be had, one more like to chase.
While some experts have suspected that this kind of instant feedback and gratification might negatively affect young minds, a new study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) suggests such connectivity comes at a worrisome cost by increasing ADHD symptoms in teens who use digital media at a high rate.
When researchers surveyed 2,587 high school students in a prospective, longitudinal study, they found that teens who engaged in 14 different digital media activities multiple times a day had increased odds of developing ADHD symptoms.
The activities included checking social media sites, texting, online chatting, and posting one’s own photos, videos, blogs, or status updates. More than half of those surveyed logged onto social media platforms and texted multiple times per day.
Ten of the 14 activities were significantly associated with ADHD symptoms like difficulty completing tasks and trouble remaining still. The self-reported symptoms were measured every six months for two years.
The risk grew by a modest 11 percent with each additional media activity the students engaged in at a high rate. Yet the cumulative effect meant that teens who participated multiple times per day in seven of the 14 activities showed more than twice the prevalence for symptoms than teens who weren’t frequent media users.
“This study raises new concerns whether the proliferation of high-performance digital media technologies may be putting a new generation of youth at risk for ADHD.”
The students, a diverse group that all attended Los Angeles County schools, didn’t have significant ADHD symptoms prior to participating in the study.
That said, this doesn’t mean that digital media necessarily caused their ADHD symptoms.
“We cannot confirm whether there is a causal effect of digital media use on ADHD from our study,” Adam Leventhal, the study’s lead author and director of the USC Health, Emotion, & Addiction Laboratory, wrote in an email. “However, this study raises new concerns whether the proliferation of high-performance digital media technologies may be putting a new generation of youth at risk for ADHD.”
Those concerns will no doubt rattle parents who already feel unsure about helping their children navigate digital media use when the internet is practically inescapable.
Apps to limit screen time have proliferated in the past year, and Leventhal said those tools could aid parents: “Simply having information on the extent of use may be a good starting point for thinking about whether changes in media use might be helpful.”
Last month, Apple introduced its Screen Time feature to help users gauge and restrict their phone use. It also allows parents to track their children’s activity and set limits accordingly. Yet, we still don’t know if there’s an optimal amount of time to spend on a digital device, or at what point excessive use might negatively affect a person’s brain functioning and mental health.
Where does ADHD start?
Some researchers have long suspected digital media use might play a role in ADHD, or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, a condition characterized by inattention and impulsivity.
Though it’s heritable, genes only account for so much of a person’s risk. Other factors include exposure to environmental toxins during pregnancy, low birth weight, and brain injuries. It’s also more common in boys than girls. Diagnosis rates in children have skyrocketed over the past two decades for reasons that experts don’t fully understand.
Jenny Radesky, a pediatrician and researcher at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, Ann Arbor, wrote in an accompanying JAMA editorial that several “novel mechanisms” could explain the associations Leventhal and his coauthors found.
The persuasive design inherent to digital media — which lives and dies by engaging users for longer periods of time — can lead to regular shifts in our attention and multitasking. That might worsen the brain’s decision-making power. Digital media may also affect our impulse control while creating an “always-on” culture that Radesky said gives the brain little opportunity to “rest in its default mode, tolerate boredom, or practice mindfulness.”
Dimitri A. Christakis, director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, said the new JAMA study is the best effort he’s seen to shed light on the relationship between ADHD and digital media. (Christakis is also the editor-in-chief of JAMA Pediatrics but had no involvement in the study or its publication.)
Previous cross-sectional studies haven’t followed children over time to measure the potential influence of digital media use. That’s made it difficult to determine whether they were, in fact, more likely to use digital media because they had ADHD.
While Leventhal and his co-authors weren’t able to eliminate this kind of “reverse causality” as an explanation for the changes they observed in students, they did control for several other factors like income and mental health symptoms.
Christakis praised the authors’ decision to avoid making an official ADHD diagnosis and focus instead on behavior associated with the condition.
“It’s not only ADHD we should be worried about.”
“They looked at ADHD symptoms like distractibility and inability to focus, and those symptoms — without a clinical diagnosis of ADHD — are not good things to have,” he said. “It’s not only ADHD we should be worried about.”
Christakis, who works with parents on managing their children’s media use, said the study provides more support for the broad dialogue we’re already having about how to sensibly limit the amount of time children spend on mobile devices.
Some parents may give their kids a phone to stay in close contact, particularly as they reach middle school, but pay little attention to how they’re using that device for social media, gaming, and chatting.
“We put children into the Wild West, and I think that’s where the problems start,” said Christakis.
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