We’ve all heard how social media is devastating teen mental health — but a shocking new report confirms it’s robbing pretty much everyone of the ability to focus.
The meta-study from Griffith University in Australia analyzed 71 surveys with more than 98,000 research subjects and found that consuming short-form video is associated with diminished attention span and inhibition control.
“I used to think the main damage from social media was to youth mental health,” psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of the bestselling book “The Anxious Generation,” recently posted on X. “Now I believe that the global destruction of the human ability to pay attention may be even larger.”
Talking to The Post, he went even harder: “Humanity is getting stupider, thanks to our technology, at the exact moment when our machines are getting smarter … It started as soon as we all started carrying smartphones and scrolling past anything that contained four seconds of boredom.”
And that goes for all ages. John, a 27-year-old law student from Michigan says short-form video — like TikToks and Instagram Reels and stories — has taken a toll on both him and his Boomer mom.
He admits it’s hard to watch TV without reaching for his phone and that he never eats a meal without engaging with some form of social media.
“In class it can be hard to focus on what the professor is saying for more than a few minutes without checking my phone or opening LinkedIn. It feels like a compulsion,” said John, who asked to withhold his last name to protect his family’s privacy.
“I’ve seen Facebook addiction in my parents, which is having a way more detrimental effect on them than it is on me, because at least I’m cognizant of the tactics [used by social media companies],” he said. “My Boomer parents are not.”
He estimates that his mom, who is retired, spends three to four hours on Facebook a day.
“For me, this is the saddest aspect of social media,” he said. “It has taken my mother’s attention during a time when she is supposed to be reaping the rewards of a long career.”
Griffith University researchers found the negative association between attention and short-form content — defined as videos lasting a few seconds to a few minutes — was consistent across all age groups and all social media platforms.
“Repeated exposure to highly stimulating, fast-paced content may contribute to habituation, in which users become desensitized to slower, more effortful cognitive tasks such as reading, problem solving, or deep learning,” the researchers hypothesized. “This process may [gradually weaken] the brain’s ability to sustain attention on a single task.”
Educators are certainly seeing it.
Students “often can’t sit still or keep thoughts inside their heads,” Murphy Kenefick, a 28-year-old literature teacher at a Nashville high school, told The Post. “From not being able to actually read anything to [not] paying attention in class, it’s a problem.”
Some teachers are beginning to recognize the same symptoms in themselves.
A former high-school history teacher in Jonesboro, Georgia, Jordan Snow read hundreds of books just to obtain his two degrees — but admits he now “struggles to read a book consistently” thanks to social media.
“I’ve found myself unable to watch a movie [without] picking up my phone just to scroll,” Snow, 46, said.
There’s something incredibly insidious about Big Tech stealing any conscious control over our lives. Teens, it turns out, were canaries in the coal mine, warning that something catastrophic was about to happen to all of us.
And people are absolutely feeling it: A 2024 poll by Common Sense Media found that a majority (51%) of young adults aged 18 to 22 believe that social media has reduced their attention span.
Hiba Belghazi, a 24-year-old psychology student in Montreal, said YouTube was “pretty much [her] third parent growing up” and that she developed the habit of doom-scrolling when bored or stressed.
But she resolved to read 52 books this year — and has nearly met her goal. The secret to her success? She deleted social media apps and blocked YouTube on her browser.
“Emotions came up that I had been repressing — a restlessness that I had been numbing with YouTube. It was a desire to do things,” she said. “We vastly underestimate the waste of human potential and the energy being drained by these apps.”
