Adolescents, it’s time to take back your brains

Yes, you should use your phone. It’s a central part of life. It’s fun, entertaining, central to school and social life. But don’t let it own you.

Dear adolescents,

The technology industry wants to own your brain. It wants to suck every second of your life into the machine and spit out money to investors. This doesn’t mean you can’t spend time online and get what you want out of the situation. You just need to be aware of what’s really going on.

Here’s what’s really going on: You are in a bad relationship. With your phone. It’s like a bad romantic relationship where you’re getting the raw end of the deal and you don’t really realise it until after the break-up, months or years later. And you’re like: What the hell? I was totally taken advantage of. I’ll never do that again!

Time to fix the relationship.

I’ll tell you a story of what they say behind your back. Then I’ll tell you why these knuckleheads are so good at taking advantage of you.

Adolescents, it’s time to take back your brains.

Love, Matt.

Your wellbeing is in the hands of industries that want to suck as much time out of you as they can. They’re so good at it. And it’s not because they’re particularly smart. No, they’re just selling something that’s largely irresistible. Dopamine squirts.

I know how good it feels to get squirted.

At the time of the introduction of the iPhone, I noticed a shift in my own behaviour when it came to these devices. I was having trouble putting my phone down. It beckoned to me with magnetic powers. I was particularly curious about my use of the phone when I was driving. I could watch the freaking stupidity in my behaviour as I glanced at my phone while piloting a half-tonne vehicle – an accident waiting to happen.

The trouble is these devices play to your deep neurological wiring and can be so compelling as to be addictive. The games and social media interact with the reward systems in the brain. They provide adults and youths alike with a constant source of stimulation and our craving for social connection, squirts of dopamine from information that is new, scary, bad – all of which play to different primitive impulses.

Imagine that you are a caveperson sitting at a fire and you feel a tap on the shoulder. Could you avoid turning around to look? No, because you wouldn’t know if the tap is friend, foe, enemy, potential mate. When your phone buzzes, it is like a tap on the shoulder from anyone, anywhere in the world.

Mobile devices and social media are a near-perfect delivery system of neurochemicals to the developing brain. Picture: iStock

On top of that, these devices act like slot machines, sometimes paying off for our attention and other times providing less interesting stuff. But, oddly, the science shows, this makes the devices more powerful because you never know which ping is going to be a good one. You must check each time.

The entire business model of companies involved in building the phones and apps is to keep people online as much as possible. They are trying to ensnare our attention and they are amazing at doing it.

This is even more challenging for adolescents. The reason has to do with your brain development. You are wired to explore and, as a result, to have less inhibition. The control centre of your brains are less developed than adults’. So, asking you to ignore the device is asking you to use a part of your brain that isn’t fully developed.

Furthermore, and maybe most importantly, the information you are getting on these devices is social in nature. It is coming from your peers. You could hardly invent a recipe more likely to appeal to an adolescent brain. Bottom line: mobile devices and the social media deliver are a near-perfect delivery system of neurochemicals to the developing brain. This can create some serious problems by hijacking the time of an adolescent, who needs lots of different physical, emotional, and interpersonal experiences for the brain to develop in a healthy way.

Also, your device can be like a drug. Just like a drug, it can distract you and help you escape from what you’re feeling. Is this good? Sometimes, maybe, sure. Is it bad? Also, sometimes. The reason is because how we grow up is partly by learning to live with our real emotions, sensations, experiences, feelings. Escaping those all the time makes it hard to learn how to just exist.

Does this mean you shouldn’t use a phone? No. Meaning: Yes, you should use your phone. It’s a central part of life. It’s fun, entertaining, central to school and social life.

But own that shit. Don’t let the knuckleheads own you. Take time to decompress. Use social media, and all the rest, on your terms.

Here’s one simple way to do it that will give you an even greater sense of reward than you usually get. Put the phone down for 30 minutes, or an hour. Let the messages build up, put off the next level of the game, let the anticipation grow as you do something else. Then, return to the gadget and get extra pleasure from the delayed gratification.

Make that phone your tool, instead of being its tool. Make it your slave, don’t let it enslave you.

Dear parents

It would be really nice, were it true, to be able to say that the rise in mental health distress is a direct result of heavy use of social media. It’s just not that straightforward; there are other factors at play.

Adolescence is, by evolutionary design, a period of risk-taking and diversification. That is true of adolescence across time. But this generation is experiencing a twist.

For centuries, adolescents were not looking so closely inward. The territory being explored was physical, the world outside, the place where enemies might gather, or terrain, weather, and other conditions might prove opportunistic for growing or hunting food, building shelter, and so forth. Those times weren’t all that long ago. It was a harsh physical world, not permitting the luxury of inward exploration.

Then, over the past century or more, we did look more inward as a species, taking a particularly hard turn in that direction in the 1960s. This is especially true in Western societies, those that put a premium on individual expression and discovery. Each generation has explored more deeply. It has expanded the territory of human consciousness, the way explorers and pioneers once looked for new lands.

I refer to this newer group of young people as Generation Rumination. They are looking inward at all kinds of things: What is gender anyway? What is a boy? What is a girl? Are they more than social and personal constructs? Which am I? And they are being urged in this direction by forces well beyond their control – biology and neurobiology on one side and a changing environment on the other.

The inward-looking explorer can become obsessed, ruminative, and succumb to pressures – real and imagined. Picture: iStock

Generation Rumination is growing up in the realm of the mind and psyche. Asking why some are struggling is like asking why some adolescents of yesteryear skinned their knees and broke their bones while trekking over a mountain to explore new terrain.

Just like the physical exploration of unknown lands in centuries past, this probing is not without risks. In the physical world, there could be wounds to the body, natural elements that are hostile and dangerous. This includes physical risks like teen pregnancy, drunk driving injury and death, dangers of binge drinking and smoking.

But those risks have fallen over the past two decades and experimentation and risk-taking in the physical world turned to exploration of the virtual world. This had its own challenges.

The inward-looking explorer can become obsessed, ruminative, and succumb to pressures – real and imagined. This is not everyone. But an overwhelmed mind can be one that is at risk. And this exploration and probing is happening in a particular environment: the Information Age, where the number of ideas, options, opportunities, paths and threats are as loud and voluminous as at any time in history.

There’s not just more opportunity, there’s more threat.

The internet has opened the world, while also transforming the environment in such a way that it contributed to the emergence of a mental health crisis among a generation of adolescents. White noise, competitive information, judgment, lies, and false promises bombarded teenagers and played a role, science shows, in increased feelings of anxiety and depression. Generation Rumination didn’t just look inward, it could become obsessed with dark matters.

A rapidly evolving environment is not the only change impacting adolescence. There is another factor undergoing radical change: the adolescent brain. Adolescence is not only lasting longer, it’s starting earlier. And that’s because of a profound shift in neurobiology.

There has been a significant change to the adolescent brain: the age of puberty is falling.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Matt Richtel, author of How We Grow Up

 

Two hundred years ago, puberty hit as much as four years later for girls than it does today, and boys experienced roughly the same change. There are a handful of reasons puberty has fallen but a big one is the rise in nutrition; food was once scarce, and thin, undernourished bodies could not handle making a baby and taking care of it. But as food became more readily available, the puberty rate dropped, signalling to bodies that they could make and sustain a new life.

As hormonal changes set in earlier, the transition is causing some adolescents to become highly sensitive to the point of being effectively emotionally paralysed. So much of their time is spent on devices, leading to a collision of a brain under development with technology designed to be addictive and moving at a breakneck pace, and an industry that profits from devouring attention.

What all this leads to is one crucial revelation for some modern adolescents: some are dealing with a neurological mismatch. This is a mismatch between the capabilities of the maturing adolescent brain and the demands of the environment.

Yet adolescents are also like start-up companies in a world that requires new ideas. Their approaches, challenging as they might be to our system, are how individuals survive, and the species perseveres in an uncertain, unpredictable, changing, sometimes hostile environment. Their stories, by definition, are filled with suspense. Each has an ending that feels unpredictable, and most end well. Still, the journey feels perilous right up until it resolves.

I am optimistic about how this all plays out, and the future – even the present – of adolescence. What appears to be a period of chaotic tumult and rebellion appears instead to be a period of life that, by design, helps crack the status quo and push all of us into new directions. The tension they experience internally and bring to society has profound purpose.

This is an edited extract from How We Grow Up: Understanding Adolescence by Matt Richtel, published in Australia by HarperCollins on July 8 (ebook) and July 16 (paperback).