When psychiatrists first decided to recognize compulsive gambling as a behavioral addiction in the 1980s, it opened a whole new way of thinking. If behaviors, not just substances, could be addictive in not just a colloquial way, but a clinical one too, then who knew where else these dangers lurked?
Today, the question of what constitutes true behavioral addiction looms over social media. Though we understand ways that social media plays with our mental reward systems, whether or not it really hooks our brains in the same way as drugs is something researchers are unable to agree on.
The problem, one researcher told me, is that nobody can agree on a consistent way to study this. While a new paper, which tracks the reactions of U.K. students who take a break from social media, offers new clues about whether the behavior is truly addictive, it also reveals how far social science still needs to go to understand how our behaviors affect our brains.
