This article was originally published in UCSB's ' The Current '.
Too much screen time — particularly related to social media use in kids, teens and young adults — is a major concern in modern society. Smartphones are ubiquitous. Social media is enticing. And the impulse-control and decision-making capacities in young brains are not yet fully developed.
While social media addiction hasn’t been officially recognized as a mental health condition, it shows up in brain scans, according to Kylie Falcione, a graduate student in the Department of Communication and professor René Weber's Media Neuroscience Lab at UC Santa Barbara.