By Kalena Reynolds | Staff Writer
POV: You’re a college student in the year 2024. Your friends would rather send selfies on Snapchat than have a conversation at dinner, and your boyfriend spends more on OnlyFans than flowers. You find yourself scrolling through TikTok for hours, and even in class, you can’t escape the thick fog of a cotton candy-flavored Escobar.
Dopamine is a highly-accessible commodity to Gen Z. It is crucial to our health and survival. There are two types, which we can call natural and unnatural dopamine.
Natural dopamine includes sleep, healthy food, exercise, etc. Unnatural dopamine includes alcohol, nicotine, porn, unhealthy food and social media, according to an article published Journal of Student Research.
As a generation, we are addicted to short bursts of dopamine — myself included. Ultimately, this makes it almost impossible for us to do anything that doesn’t produce the same chemical reaction.
A person’s reward system is most sensitive during adolescence, yet society is beginning to give young people unlimited access to three categories of highly addictive things: social media, porn and nicotine.
Porn
While sexuality has become widely accepted within pop culture, I’m going to strictly exclude that in my definition of pornography. I’m specifically referring to content that is created and consumed with the intention of sexual arousal.
Porn negatively affects a person’s brain. Researchers Kühn & Gallinat conducted an experiment to research the responses that occurred in our brains while watching porn and found a significant health concern in patients that were regular consumers.
“They found that their reward system was highly affected and most importantly, grey matter was diminished in men that watched porn often,” according to an article published by Santa Clarita University. “The reason that this is an alarming discovery is because grey matter consists of neuron cell bodies that are necessary for everyday activities. According to current medical discoveries, once grey matter is damaged or lost, it can no longer be regained; loss of grey matter has been linked to other disorders such as bipolar, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s.”
Social Media
As the generation dubbed the “digital natives,” it goes without saying that we have become a society that revolves around social media.
For Gen Z, face-to-face interaction has almost been completely replaced with social media and texting — but at what cost?
While researchers are currently developing criteria to classify social media addiction, they have been able to identify a few of the negative effects that occur with extreme social media use, such as grey matter decrease and dopamine irregularity.
Aside from the neurobiological effects of social media on Gen Z, mental health problems have skyrocketed within the generation that researchers have linked to excessive social media use.
As a member of Gen Z who already feels consumed by technology and social media, it’s difficult to imagine where we go from here. What will that look like for our mental and physical health?
Nicotine
The irony is that statistics show cigarette smoking is going down every year; however, for Gen Z, cigarettes are being replaced with vapes, a device made initially to help addicts quit smoking.
Many can attest that vaping has become a casual occurrence in our lives. Vapes are easily accessible and marketed towards teenagers and young adults.
Large vape companies like JUUL have been criticized for targeting ads and marketing specifically created for teenagers.
Gen. Z has been given many tools, such as the internet and technology, without being shown the risks of overuse and what addiction looks like. Sure, people acknowledge that cigarettes are addictive in current times, but in the 1930s, they were physician-recommended, according to Yale University Library.
I predict that there will eventually be a point in the world where social media, porn and nicotine addiction become a regular condition for Gen Z, and the effects will be more widely known.
Mental health problems are skyrocketing within our generation, and loneliness is becoming “the norm,” simply due to the disruption we’ve created in our body’s dopamine production.
If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, contact the Beauchamp Addiction Recovery Center at 254-710-7092.
