The Effects of Smartphones & Social Media on People's Health

Your smartphone is the most powerful health tool you own — and one of the most dangerous.
In a world where the average person touches their phone over 600 times a day, the boundary between digital convenience and digital dependency has all but disappeared. The Effect of Smartphones and Social Media on People's Health is the definitive evidence-based examination of what constant connectivity is doing to the human body, mind, and soul — and what we can do about it.
Drawing on the most current peer-reviewed research from 2020 through 2025 — including landmark studies from NEJM AI, The Lancet, JAMA Network Open, and the NIH's Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study tracking 11,875 children — Dr. Amdy Diene delivers a rigorous, honest, and deeply human account of digital technology's health consequences across ten comprehensive chapters:

• How social media algorithms exploit dopamine reward circuits to engineer compulsive behavior — and what the neuroimaging evidence reveals about structural brain changes in heavy users

• The physical toll of text neck syndrome, digital eye strain (now affecting 66% of device users globally), and blue-light-disrupted sleep

• Why adolescents spending more than 3 hours daily on social media face double the risk of depression and anxiety — and what the first large-scale causal RCT evidence shows about recovery

• How body image disturbances have systematically worsened between 2015 and 2022, tracking precisely with the rise of TikTok and image-centric platforms

• The cognitive cost of constant connectivity — and how blocking mobile internet for just two weeks restored sustained attention equivalent to being ten years younger