Are Smartphones Starving Adolescent Brains?
Dr. James Winston and his groundbreaking theory that digital addiction causes a nutritional deficiency In developing brains
There has been a lot of news recently about the deleterious effects on the developing brains of children and adolescents who spend too much time online. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (@afterbabel) and many others who have studied it pin most of the blame for spiraling rates of poor adolescent and teen mental health — including depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation — on social media. “The costs of using social media, in particular, are high for adolescents, compared with adults, while the benefits are minimal,” Haidt writes in his latest bestseller, The Anxious Generation.
Social media is unquestionably an irresistible magnet for kids, but Dr. James Winston, a Miami Beach-based psychologist with 30 years of experience in the field of addiction, says putting the blame on social media is too simplistic.1 Winston believes that the culprit is the device itself — the smartphone — and that extensive use during the crucial years of childhood brain development creates a neurological nutritional deficiency for users fourteen and younger.
“Smartphones are starving the brain,” he says.
While Winston’s smartphone-induced nutritional deficiency seems initially a revolutionary idea, it provides a straightforward, organic answer as to how digital technology has created and fed a mental health crisis among kids.
The theory certainly drew a lot of attention and excitement after a presentation Winston made at a program last week in Miami Beach, “The Effects of Screen Time on Adolescent Brain Development.” After the event, when I spoke to academics, researchers, local politicians, and parents, all thought it might be the next big step in figuring out how to protect children when it comes to the harms of digital addiction.
Margarita Louis-Dreyfus, the Swiss billionaire businesswoman and philanthropist, had flown in from Switzerland to co-host the event. She had created Human Change last year, “a coalition of parents, advocates, educators, psychologists, pediatricians, clinicians, and researchers who are raising the alarm about the dangers of digital devices and social media to children’s health and development.” This past January, Winston had joined Louis-Dreyfus and Human Change at the World Economic Forum, trying to raise awareness of the issue among the global leaders that gathered in Davos.
Winston has no social media accounts and uses an AOL email address. But, as the single father of teen sons, he is no newcomer to the subject of technology and kids. I wrote about Winston two years ago in Forbes - '“This Family Foundation Is Quietly Going To War With Facebook Over How It Affects Kids’ Brains” - regarding how he and four relatives of a family foundation left by his father were spearheading scientific research at the University of North Carolina into how social media platforms affected young brains. The family’s $10 million gift in 2022 created an eponymously named National Center on Technology Use, Brain, and Psychological Development. That UNC research center is the only one in the country that does not accept money from tech companies.
Last year the center published the results of a groundbreaking 3-year study in JAMA Pediatrics. It utilized functional MRIs to monitor the brains of middle school students. The results showed that the brains of teens who frequently checked their social media developed differently than those who did not check social media very much. The heavy social media users were far more hypersensitive to feedback than their less connected peers.
For Winston, a UNC and Oxford alum, who worked with drug addicts at a federal prison and later as clinical supervisor at an adolescent sex offender treatment program before going into private practice, his initial interest in the field came about unexpectedly.
“I used to be one of those nerd dads who walked their kids into school every day,” he recounts. “And we would get bumped into by students coming the other way. Every day that happened. Very few of them even looked up from their phones. Professionally, I knew that was one of the critical variables in addictive dynamics, interference with basic self-care, thinking about survival. We've all supposed to be aware of our surroundings, simple things like avoiding potholes or hurting ourselves or others. These kids were bumping into each other because the magnetic pull of their devices was so powerful that they were oblivious to everyone around them.”
Winston talks animatedly about attachment theory, introduced by British psychologist John Bowlby in the 1950s and 1960s to understand the emotional bond between infants and their parents.
“We require sustained attachment to caretakers in order to develop into thriving human beings,” he says. “Where our sustained attention goes, so goes our attachment to that person, so in terms of human bonding, attention is the currency of value.”
“Smartphones are strategically designed to capture this exact attention. The tech companies know exactly what they're doing. They're developing a device that is architecturally constructed to be overstimulating. That gives it a huge addictive potential. And if you think about it, it's really a parallel universe, a digital parallel universe, and it's unlimited.”
The crux of the problem, says Winston, is that “adolescents are incapable of regulating hyper-arousing dynamics. That’s why we don’t let kids watch violence or allow them into a casino, because we know intuitively that they cannot integrate that in a healthy way.”
A parallel problem is that smartphones significantly impact neurobiological adolescent brain development.
“Our brains developed over tens of thousands of years to absorb visceral input,” says Winston, “eye contact, voice quality, touch, it is how we unfold in a healthy way.”
“Our brains learned to process if someone was sarcastic, affectionate, snarky, or what it's like when you say something, and they're hurt. If they're mad, you can discern all that. The richness and dimensionality of face-to-face contact is visceral nutrition for the brain.”
That is where the smartphone comes to play, and thousands of years of brain wiring starts to go haywire for kids.
Winston sees all the classic signs of addiction when it comes to adolescents and smartphones. There is increased self-centeredness, cravings and dependency for the device, externalization of responsibility, and withdrawal symptoms if the smartphone is taken away. “Ever try to take an iPad away from a six-year-old? We call that reaction a tantrum, and in addiction terminology that's called withdrawal.”
Some researchers have contended that tech is not a classical addiction since it does not cross the blood brain barrier. “Gambling doesn't either,” counters Winston. “But we all know gambling is an addictive disease. Cell phones don't cross your blood brain barrier but still ticks all the addiction boxes.”
“Access to a drug is a critical variable in the development of an addictive dynamic,” he adds. “Smartphones are not just another tech advancement; they are qualitatively different in that they can be carried around with us all the time. While that makes it easier for people, including adults, to get addicted, it is especially dangerous for adolescents, ages 9 -14. This is the second most critical time of brain development and is when the neural highway system that we carry into adulthood is established.”2
The adolescent brain undergoes a massive restructuring process as kids near and enter puberty. The young brain is designed to prune itself of circuitry no longer needed from childhood.
“And it is during this time,” notes Winston, “when the need for adolescent social connection is as powerful an instinct as hunger. They are transitioning from family centric mother and father to a peer system. It is wired into our DNA as a transitional period when adolescents make friends, develop empathy, and learn their social skills needed for early adulthood. Tech companies know this and exploit it. If they can get a pathway system laid down, where kids are attached to their phones, and in particular social media, they've got a lifetime customer. It's no different, except in the quality of the substance, than cigarettes. They used to target kids so they would have them for life.”
Research shows adolescents spend on average eight hours a day behind a screen.
“That is four months a year,” Winston says, “half of their waking hours.”
He returns to attachment theory.
“Attention is going through a screen instead of a dimensional dynamic with face-to -face contact. It has profound implications both emotionally, psychologically, and neurobiologically.”
Why is he focused on the device as opposed to what it contains?
“As an addiction guy, a critical factor that facilitates an addictive dynamic is access to a drug,” he notes. “You can't really be an alcoholic if you can't get alcohol, for instance. The constant and easy access to smartphones amplifies the addictive process.”
He cites a recent study that shows kids pick up their phones roughly 100 times a day. “That is pretty extraordinary,” he says. “So, there's some magnetic pull that keeps them going.”
What is good news for tech companies — that kids want to stay on their devices more than ever — is, for Winston, “horrifying in terms of adolescence. I've witnessed kids interacting with one another. Then, one kid gets kind of anxious. Instead of staying connected with the other kids, they pick up their phone. So, phones have become a medicator, which is a powerful ingredient in any addictive process. And it allows kids to avoid the hard work of really having to learn how to manage their feelings, the uncomfortable ones in particular, to work it out face to face. They go to the phone and the anxiety goes away.”
That is no different in Winston’s view than an alcoholic who takes a drink to offset anxiety.
Where Winston’s theory goes beyond the work of Haidt and others is in his belief that the tech addiction for kids creates a measurable nutritional deficiency.
“Both fruits and candy contain sugar,” says Winston, “but they are otherwise nothing alike. There is a big difference between having a banana for a snack or a snickers bar. The simple sugars in candy spike blood sugar, are void of nutrients, and since they are calorie dense, people need to eat a lot to feel full. It is no coincidence that the brains of cocaine addicts and sugar addicts looks basically the same. You can never get enough of what you don’t need. That is smartphones.”
What are the results of Winston’s nutritional deficiency? “If it was one hour a day, it might not have such bad effects on things like depression and anxiety. But the mental and psychological problems spike as it becomes a nutritional deficiency at scale with more and more hours stuck on a phone.”
There are huge ramifications if Winston is right about smartphones creating a nutritional brain deficiency at a particularly critical development period for adolescent brains. It would open the door for the Surgeon General and other government health officials and institutions to get involved. Winston’s dream scenario is a ban on smartphones for kids younger than 14, the age he set for his own sons to get their phones. “It would protects adolescents’ neurobiological vulnerabilities, allowing kids a longer runway to feed on vital social ‘visceral nutrition’ which facilitates healthy brain and psychological development.”
“I know everybody laughs But I think that was probably true in the 1940s if someone said that about cigarettes.” He believes that society is in the middle of the same historical process as played out with cigarettes. “Cigarettes used to be cool. Then science proved they were not only addictive but caused cancer. Legislation banned sales to minors.”
At the very least, Winston hopes to get state by state or national legislation to ban smartphones at schools. Research shows a 6% increase in academic performance when phones are removed. “It is a no cost enhancement of one of schools’ primary functions.”
Another ambitious goal is warning labels outlining the addictive potential of smartphones, “the equivalent of ‘cigarettes will kill you’”.
“I think this still sounds radical to some people and they will think it will never happen. Interestingly, in Chile, a few months ago, they put little warning labels on processed food, and it really had a huge impact on the amount of processed food that was bought. So much so that it began to shift Chile’s obesity rate.”
There is significant correlational research documenting the dangers of too much social media and smartphone use. What is missing is the hard science data. It is needed to force government action that could bolster his provocative theory with incontrovertible facts. That is why he and his family, and other activists like Margarita Louis-Dreyfus, are funding research studies.
“It is why I jumped at the opportunity to get some funding to the UNC center,” says Winston. “The science must stand on its own. Whether you're Republican or Democrat or what, it doesn't matter, this is the science. In every historical social change movement, the tipping point at a national level has come after the accumulation of apolitical science.”
The sooner the hard science comes, the better. The mental health of our children is what is at stake.
Full Disclosure: I serve, along with my wife, Trisha Posner, on the board of The Winston Family Initiative in Technology & Adolescent Brain Development, a nonprofit founded in 2023 whose mission is to educate kids and parents and to promote a change in national narrative around smartphones and our children.
The first most critical period of brain development for children is between 2 and 3 years of age.
I am SO glad those damn things didn't exist when I was a teen...
I'm not so sure they aren't harming the brains of all ages.
At the very least, they cut down on social interaction in public settings. Go to any area where you might be likely talk to others, both friends and complete strangers. Look around a bit and see what you see (yes, put your phone down for just a minute or two).