Social Media is Not Making You Happy - The Science of What It is Actually Doing to Your Mind
You open the app. You scroll for two minutes. You put the phone down feeling vaguely worse than when you picked it up. You pick it up again three minutes later. This is not a character flaw. It is the product working exactly as designed. And the gap between how social media makes us feel and why we keep using it anyway is one of the most interesting and consequential questions in modern public health. I want to talk about what the science actually shows — because the honest picture is more nuanced than either "social media is destroying mental health" or "social media is fine, stop blaming technology." The Scale of Where We Are Social media platforms had over 5.17 billion users globally in 2024 with projections reaching 6.05 billion users by 2028. NHS Confederation Source: PMC, MDPI This is not a niche behaviour. It is the dominant communication and information infrastructure of the modern world. Understanding its effects on mental health is not optional for...