A study has revealed how our body responds to scrolling down our social media feeds
It’s no secret that social media has a tight grip on most of us, but what is happening to our bodies as we scroll endlessly through Instagram or TikTok?
New research has uncovered some of the unique physiological reactions that occur when we get lost in our social feeds.
A recent study looked into the body’s response to social media usage by asking 54 young adults to browse Instagram for 15 minutes, comparing it to our body’s response to reading a news story.
Sensors attached to their chests and fingers measured their heart rates and skin conductance, which is a sign of sweating.
They found that, while scrolling on social media, their heart rates slowed, but at the same time, they started sweating more.
Based on existing research, this odd combination suggests that social media can both absorb us and excite us, creating a state of deep immersion, according to one of the authors of the study.
Niklas Ihssen, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Durham University wrote for The Conversation: “The most intriguing effect in our study happened when we interrupted participants at the end of their Instagram stint and asked them to go back to reading another news article.
“Rather than snapping out of the excitement and returning to a calmer state, participants’ sweating response increased further, while heart rate also increased rather than slowed down further.”
This suggests that their bodies were essentially protesting the forced withdrawal. Participants even reported feeling stressed or anxious when they had to disconnect from their feed, leading some experts to draw parallels with addiction.
However, Prof Ihssen says the study did not find clear evidence of social media addiction. It compared the biological data to questionnaire data about social media addiction and found no clear link between the two.
The authors wrote in the study: “Importantly, changes in physiology were not associated with problematic use symptoms. Our findings indicate that brief engagement with SNSs [social networking site] elicits reward-driven arousal and attentional immersion while ending such states can induce aversive physiological and subjective stress in both problematic and regular SNS users.”
Previous research by Prof Ihssen has found that it is the ‘social’ aspect of social media that makes it so desirable. “This also means that – in contrast to drugs – social media taps into basic human needs: we all want to belong and to be liked,” Ihssen wrote in the Conversation.
The next time you find yourself locked into a scroll on social media, just remember that it’s not just your eyes that are glued to your screen, your body is too.
The study was published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.
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