Almost half of British teens feel addicted to social media – study

I think this is an unfortunately not enough discussed topic. As sciences are young (as psychology relatively is) you work on broader problems and much more aggregated results. You make naive assumptions like everything exists in normal distributions or data is i.i.d. So you get results that are big generalizations and sometimes not even reliable. But then as a field advances, it naturally shifts into requiring more and more nuance and specificity. Where you have to start considering multivariate solutions (even if that's a mixture of gaussians, which, awesome tool btw) because you approach a natural wall at the explainability of your data with naive methods. And let's be clear, if we wanted to really rigorously study psychology -- at the same level as, say, physics -- then there would need to be a lot of crazy math invented and we'd probably still end up needing to do unethical things because holy fuck how do you control all those variables. (definitely warrants being open about error and unknowns)

There's nothing wrong with that. But I do think it's wrong that we're not open about it, in so much that it isn't even always explicitly stated during a science education. We might say something like "all models are wrong" but I don't think that solidifies this thinking enough for novices and can create experts who still don't get it. Wherein it becomes a classic clique, where everyone knows the phrase but doesn't understand or practice the lesson.

There's some noticeable downsides too. If you're constantly not reiterating what your base assumptions are and acknowledging the limitation of those assumptions, you forget they exist. It also becomes hard to communicate the significance of your work to the public and I think in some cases is often why the public ends up calling (sometimes rightfully, sometimes not) bullshit. I think there's also a major advantage to science, in being open about these helps newcomers (such as those entering graduate school) more readily understand the limitations of the field and what work needs to be done. But I think some incentive structures we have in place don't encourage great scientific behavior in this way. Speaking of which, other metrics can even end up making bridging this multivariate gap more difficult. Such as the all too well known p-value weirdness, you may end up rejecting works making progress towards this bridging by having these arbitrary requirements rather than evaluating works with more nuance, which can even then discourage attempting to build such bridges. I guess coming full circle to: it's complicated? Like everything else lol

In addition to therapist, as others state, I'd also suggest just being more open with your friends (I also get that it can be intimidating to see a therapist and it's easy to justify not going, especially if you're in a good mood). Maybe grab some beers or something to create a scapegoat/plausible deniability if needed. I've long suffered from depression and this has been one of the most impactful moves for me, especially around identifying latent issues that appear more ethereal. It can be hard, especially in our general gender norms (I'm male) where some people will think it is a weakness (men and women), but to me strength is doing the hard things. YMMV, but I think it is important to have friends and/or partner(s) that you can be open with and just have the ability to vent. Fuck, sometimes I don't even know what I'm upset about until I let off a little steam first, and often just an outside opinion helps.

I can also suggest small internet communities as these can be places to form friendships while having some PII type of anonymity and at least for me helped me be more open before I was ready to open up to friends. Places like HN and reddit are probably too large, but hey, I'll put this out in general to anyone, feel free to reach out over email[0]. You can also get something similar by just talking to random people at a bar.

Whatever works best for you, but it all is a noisy process. But at the end of the day I think what's most critical is that you find some means of just opening up. You don't have to stick to one group either, and if you need to start at one place to build up to another, there's no problem with that. Take it as a journey, not a destination. But I will say having at least a one or two core friends (and ideally a partner) is going to be one of the most helpful things you can do for your mental health. A therapist will never be enough but you should think of them as a very useful and different tool (because you do want advice not coming from those who want to protect you. Outside opinions are invaluable and a good therapist will do their best, but consider they can only work with the context you give and what they can get from you).

[0] In my profile. And if anyone has a suggestion for a better anonymous email, let me know. I'm kinda annoyed at proton's ads.

How many of us reading this title are addicted to this website (which you can argue is a form of social media, is it not?)

How many of us read + communicate on this as well as Reddit as well as... Telegram/WhatsApp/Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/TikTok/etc.

> I can't imagine what it is like now growing up with access to all the world's information in your pocket.

"All the world's information" isn't really the problem; it's having all the world's bullshit, vitriol, manipulation, and general madness in your pocket.

For sure. I've noticed that my digestion improves if i am engrossed on the internet all day even without excercise.