The constant flux of TikTok clips, Instagram reels and YouTube shorts running through our social-media feeds isn't only zapping our attention spans, it's altering how we perceive time.
"Future time perspective" is our capacity to tie our present activities to later outcomes. For students, this means seeing the benefit of studying because they know it can result in good grades, which can lead to college admission and eventually, a job. That multidimensional way of thinking allows them to set aside immediate rewards-such as watching videos or playing videogames-in favor of doing homework.
Researchers at several universities in China, in a study involving more than 1,500 high-school students, found that their future time perspective was damaged by a steady diet of such short-form videos.
These videos, in particular, activate the reward circuitry of the brain with their novel, engaging and effortless nature, leading to instant and constant gratification. We already saw in a previous study that this type of engagement activates the addiction centers of our brains, and in some cases makes it hard for us to stop viewing.
Now, it's also making us less able to plan for the future, or even care about it.
The brain effects hold true for adults, but are more pronounced in teens, says Dr. Vera Feuer, chief clinical officer at the Child Mind Institute, a mental-health treatment provider.
Adolescents already have a harder time than adults with planning ahead and controlling their impulses, because of the brain's immature prefrontal cortex. Consensus is that this part of the brain doesn't fully develop until around age 25.
"We know young people have difficulty with patience, tolerating frustration and delaying gratification. They have a harder time managing and overcoming difficulty," says Feuer, who wasn't involved in the China research.
But the study's results weren't all doom and gloom. "One new finding from this study is that the ability to overcome academic difficulty improves when there's a strong future point of view," Feuer says.
The study examined what the authors described as "academic buoyancy," or how students respond to and recover from common academic pressures and setbacks in daily learning. Students who are less equipped to handle academic setbacks, such as poor grades, are more inclined to use short-form videos as an escape, thus creating a negative cycle.
In other words, the videos may be less of a cause of this procrastination, and more a symptom of it. And helping kids set ambitious goals is one way to tie their academic work to the future and deprioritize the immediate rewards of video-watching.
"Cultivating adolescents' future time perspective is therefore crucial to counteract short-form video addiction's detrimental effects and bolster their academic buoyancy," the study's authors wrote. (They didn't respond to requests for comment.)
What parents can do
Social-media companies, under fire from regulators and lawsuits, have been making changes to curb youth addiction to their products, including providing break reminders in the apps, turning off push notifications at night and disabling video autoplay for teen accounts.
As part of Meta Platforms's recent $18 billion settlement with 48 states to keep children safer online, the tech giant agreed to put in place a two-hour daily limit for teens across Instagram and Facebook as well as to block the apps's main feeds between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. Meta is calling on TikTok, YouTube and Snap to agree to place the same daily time limits and nighttime restrictions on their apps.
Here are some ways parents can help their children stay on task:
Set your own app limits. As burdensome as parental controls can be, the easiest way to do it is to set device-level app time limits. This can be done by setting up Family Sharing on Apple devices, Google Family Link on Android devices or doing it directly from the screen-time settings of the actual phone. With supervised accounts, parents can set a time limit on YouTube Shorts-or turn off the short videos altogether.
Discuss when short videos are OK. If the kids really want to watch these short videos, set times of day or points during the week when they're allowed, and be sure to reinforce why you're implementing these restrictions.
Silence the phone. Have your children put their phones in focus mode while they're doing their homework so they don't receive text and social-media notifications.
Get phones out of the bedroom. Kids shouldn't be on their phones while doing their homework-though they might argue they need them for calculators and other look-ups. It's even more important to keep phones out of their rooms at night, to ensure adequate sleep.
Have them practice mindfulness. "Mindfulness" can feel like a woo-woo term, but one study found that mindfulness accounted for about half the link between short-form video addiction and lower academic engagement. Doing a brief mindfulness exercise before each study session can help students focus, it said.
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