What Social Media Does to Stress and Hormones

Social media is connected with the experience of stress¹, and too much stress impairs our abilities to remember, switch across many tasks, and sometimes impacts our ability to control our impulses². Given that stress can have negative outcomes, which are sometimes felt quite immediately in the present, and social media use is connected to stress, why is social media used so much? The answer may not just be in any functionality and fun from social media that compensates for the stress. Rather, the effects of stress on hormones, like cortisol, can make giving up a bad activity more difficult.

Social media use impacts the neuroendocrine system, which is implicated in stress responses. This is not surprising: Everything you do impacts the system in multiple ways. However, some things do it more than others, and those things tend to be associated with misuse or overuse—like drugs, alcohol, nicotine, shopping, gambling, sex, and social media.

There are many reasons why substances and behaviours have pronounced effects on the neuroendocrine system. These effects can be associated with the essential or intrinsic properties of the thing in question—its molecular structure, etc., such as with many drugs of abuse. Alternatively, they can be associated with the accidental or extrinsic properties of the thing—colours, sounds, or ways they are programmed. Social media falls into the latter category. In all cases, use impacts the neurochemicals associated with reward (endogenous opiates), neurotransmitters involved in incentive motivation and attention (e.g., dopamine), and importantly for the current purpose, hormones involved in stress responses (like cortisol). These neuroendocrine chemicals have multiple impacts on us, and on each other.

It is well known that social media is associated with dopamine activity. Such a neurotransmitter is often produced when a cue associated with a reward is perceived—"likes" or "share" notifications are such cues. However, social media use is also associated with cortisol activity. In one study, rises in cortisol activation were greater for young people who used their digital devices more often, and who had larger social networks³. Moreover, social media use keeps cortisol levels high after the experience of another stressful event, and people using social media after such an event (perhaps in a misguided attempt to calm themselves) experience higher cortisol levels⁴. Such elevated cortisol responses may be more pronounced for those who are already experiencing other problems; a study found that 20 minutes of social media use generated higher cortisol levels for depressed, than nondepressed, adolescents⁵.

It is likely that when people who show problematic usage of social media stop this usage, they will get a cortisol hit⁶. This is certainly true of people in withdrawal from most depressant drugs – like alcohol and opioids. In a study of opiate withdrawal, salivary cortisol concentration correlated significantly with withdrawal-symptom severity, and this concentration remained higher than for those not in withdrawal for the duration of the study⁷.

The presence of cortisol additionally impacts the things that people can do to deal with ongoing stress. In alcohol dependence, cortisol levels are associated with the adoption of more negative coping styles, like flight (avoidance), and resignation (failure to tackle the situation directly). This may simply mean doing more of the same (as using social media may be an escape, in itself), which produces more cortisol, and limits opportunities to tackle problems that have driven the social media use in the first instance⁸. In part, this seems to be associated with the impact of high cortisol on supressing the reactivity of the stress-response system. Stress responses to new issues are muted when cortisol is high, making active responding under high cortisol more difficult⁹.

In turn, cortisol affects release of other neuroendocrine chemicals. In particular, there is a complex relationship between levels of cortisol and levels of dopamine. Cortisol has been found to increase the production of some forms of dopamine (there are more than one).¹⁰ The reason this could be problematic is that dopamine, among other things, increases feelings of subjective reinforcement when cues predicting the appearance of good things are perceived (such as ‘likes’ popping up). This reinforcement will only increase the likelihood of continuing to use social media. In turn, this increases stress, and dependence, which increases withdrawal effects later, and produces more cortisol. More cortisol makes active coping more difficult, and escape coping more likely, producing a return to the social media use as such an escape. Overall, this makes the cycle harder to break, and shows another potential reason why using social media is so difficult to stop.

It could be argued that, once you get past the signal for the impending good thing (which is associated with dopamine release), and you get to the good thing itself, this is associated with the release of endogenous opiates. It has been suggested that the release of such endogenous opiates inhibits the secretion of cortisol¹¹, and the expression of dopamine¹². This should break the above stress-behaviour cycle. However, this appears far more likely to occur when stimulants are considered (such as cocaine and nicotine), rather than when depressants (like opiates) are considered¹². The issue is that social media tends to act like a depressant; a calming activity, many people use to step away from problems and stresses – even though it may actually make those stresses feel worse⁶.

It should not be assumed that all effects of stress are mediated through levels of cortisol. The effects of stressors are not always the same as the effects of cortisol, and stress may work through alternative processes². Events such as examinations increase stress, but they do not necessarily increase cortisol levels, which have been noted to fall under such conditions, allowing better memory¹³. It may be that stressors over which we can exert some control produce very different physiological responses to those over which we have little control. For example, receiving an electric shock produced higher feelings of helplessness and concentrations of saliva, when the shock was uncontrollable than when the same shock was self-administered¹⁴. The question is whether people generally turn to social media as a means to control a problem, or to escape from one? If it is like other behaviours of addiction – such as shopping – it is more than likely the latter.