The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

by Jonathan Haidt

overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.

If your body was turned over to just anyone, you would doubtless take exception. Why aren’t you ashamed that you have made your mind vulnerable to anyone who happens to criticize you, so that it automatically becomes confused and upset?19

Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You’ll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they’re saying, and what they’re thinking, and what they’re up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind.20

Anxiety is related to fear, but is not the same thing. The diagnostic manual of psychiatry (DSM-5-TR) defines fear as “the emotional response to real or perceived imminent threat, whereas anxiety is anticipation of future threat.”12 Both can be healthy responses to reality, but when excessive, they can become disorders.

While fear triggers the full response system at the moment of danger, anxiety triggers parts of the same system when a threat is merely perceived as possible. It is healthy to be anxious and on alert when one is in a situation where there really could be dangers lurking. But when our alarm bell is on a hair trigger so that it is frequently activated by ordinary events—including many that pose no real threat—it keeps us in a perpetual state of distress. This is when ordinary, healthy, temporary anxiety turns into an anxiety disorder.

“How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, seem to me all the uses of this world,”

For a diagnosis of MDD, these symptoms must be consistently present for at least two weeks. They are often accompanied by physical symptoms, including significant weight loss or weight gain, sleeping far less or far more than normal, and fatigue. They are also accompanied by disordered thinking, including an inability to concentrate, dwelling on one’s transgressions or failings (causing feelings of guilt) and the many cognitive distortions that CBT tries to counteract. People experiencing a depressive disorder are likely to think about suicide because it feels like their current suffering will never end, and death is an end.

People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless.

“play requires suppression of the drive to dominate and enables the formation of long-lasting cooperative bonds.”7

Gray defines “free play” as “activity that is freely chosen and directed by the participants and undertaken for its own sake, not consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself.”8

The reduction is so severe that we might refer to smartphones and tablets in the hands of children as experience blockers.

The designers had not realized that young trees need wind to grow properly. When the wind blows, it bends the tree, which tugs at the roots on the windward side and compresses the wood on the other side. In response, the root system expands to provide a firmer anchor where it is needed, and the compressed wood cells change their structure to become stronger and firmer. This altered cell structure is called reaction wood, or sometimes stress wood. Trees that are exposed to strong winds early in life become trees that can withstand even stronger winds when full grown. Conversely, trees that are raised in a protected greenhouse sometimes fall over from their own weight before they reach maturity.

As the Stoics and Buddhists taught long ago, happiness cannot be reached by eliminating all “triggers” from life; rather, happiness comes from learning to deprive external events of the power to trigger negative emotions in you. In fact, the best parenting book13 that my wife and I read when our children were toddlers urged us to look for opportunities to frustrate our children every day by laying out and enforcing the contingencies of life: If you want to watch Teletubbies, you must first put away your toys. If you persist in doing that, you’ll get a time-out. Yes, your sister got something you didn’t, and that happens sometimes.

Researchers who study children at play have concluded that the risk of minor injuries should be a feature, not a bug, in playground design.

The first philosophy, which she calls “concerted cultivation,” was the dominant model used by families in the middle and upper class. It begins with the premise that children require an extraordinary degree of care and training by adults. Parents must buy Baby Einstein videos to raise their children’s IQs (even though researchers later showed such videos to be worthless36). Children’s calendars must be filled with activities that the parents believe are enriching, such as learning Mandarin, or extra math training, even when such activities reduce autonomy and leave less room for free play. Among the working class and the poor, Lareau found a very different approach, which she called “natural growth parenting.” In this philosophy, kids will be kids, and if you just let them be, they’ll turn into competent and responsible adults without a great deal of hand-holding. But surprisingly, a recent study of attitudes toward parenting found that by the 2010s many working-class parents had moved toward concerted cultivation parenting, including a high level of protection from risk.37

Across cultures and throughout history, mothers and fathers have acted on the assumption that if their children got into trouble, other adults—often strangers—would help out. In many societies adults feel duty-bound to reprimand other people’s children who misbehave in public.

This is the world in which Gen Z was raised. It was a world in which adults, schools, and other institutions worked together to teach children that the world is dangerous, and to prevent them from experiencing the risks, conflicts, and thrills that their experience-expectant brains needed to overcome anxiety and set their default mental state to discover mode.47

Brain researchers say, “Neurons that fire together, wire together,”

Puberty is therefore a period when we should be particularly concerned about what our children are experiencing. Physical conditions, including nutrition, sleep, and exercise, matter throughout all of childhood and adolescence.

variable-ratio reinforcement schedule

animal learning is “the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the decisions of a rational consciousness.”

“The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

Smartphones grab our attention so powerfully that if they merely vibrate in our pockets for a tenth of a second, many of us will interrupt a face-to-face conversation, just in case the phone is bringing us an important update. We usually don’t tell the other person to stop talking; we just pull out our phone and spend some time pecking at it, leaving the other person to conclude, reasonably, that she is less important than the latest notification. When a conversation partner pulls out a phone,21 or when a phone is merely visible22 (not even your own phone), the quality and intimacy of a social interaction is reduced. As screen-based technologies move out of our pockets and onto our wrists, and into headsets and goggles, our ability to pay full attention to others is likely to deteriorate further.

A 2014 survey of children ages 6–12, conducted by Highlights magazine, found that 62% of children reported that their parents were “often distracted” when the child tried to talk with them.23 When they were asked the reasons why their parents were distracted, cell phones were the top response.

Gen Z are an incredibly isolated group of people. We have shallow friendships and superfluous romantic relationships that are mediated and governed to a large degree by social media …. There is hardly a sense of community on campus and it’s not hard to see. Oftentimes I’ll arrive early to a lecture to find a room of 30+ students sitting together in complete silence, absorbed in their smartphones, afraid to speak and be heard by their peers. This leads to further isolation and a weakening of self identity and confidence, something I know because I’ve experienced it firsthand.25

As the CEO of Netflix put it on an earnings call with investors when asked about Netflix’s competitors, “You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. We’re competing with sleep, on the margin.”40

In short, children and adolescents need a lot of sleep to promote healthy brain development and good attention and mood the next day. When screens are allowed in bedrooms, however, many children will use them late into the night—especially if they have a small screen that can be used under the blanket. The screen-related decline of sleep is likely a contributor to the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that swept across many countries in the early 2010s.

Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron”

In 1890, the great American psychologist William James described attention as “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought …. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”43 Attention is a choice we make to stay on one task, one line of thinking, one mental road, even as attractive off-ramps beckon. When we fail to make that choice and allow ourselves to be frequently sidetracked, we end up in “the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state” that James said is the opposite of attention.

People can’t really multitask; all we can do is shift attention back and forth between tasks while wasting a lot of it on each shift.47

The article was titled “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.”48

One researcher who explored these possibilities was B.J. Fogg, a professor at Stanford who wrote a 2002 book titled Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Fogg also taught a course titled “Persuasive Technology” in which he taught students how to take behaviorist techniques for training animals and apply them to humans. Many of his students went on to found or work at social media companies, including Mike Krieger, a cofounder of Instagram.

We know that Facebook intentionally hooked teens using behaviorist techniques thanks to the Facebook Files—the trove of internal documents and screenshots of presentations brought out by the whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021. In one chilling section, a trio of Facebook employees give a presentation titled “The Power of Identities: Why Teens and Young Adults Choose Instagram.” The stated objective is “to support Facebook Inc.–wide product strategy for engaging younger users.” A section titled “Teen Fundamentals” delves into neuroscience, showing the gradual maturation of the brain during puberty, with the frontal cortex not mature until after age 20. A later photo shows an MRI image of a brain with this caption: The teenage brain is usually about 80% mature. The remaining 20% rests in the frontal cortex …. At this time teens are highly dependent on their temporal lobe where emotions, memory and learning, and the reward system reign supreme. A subsequent slide shows the loop that Facebook’s designers strive to create in users and notes the points of vulnerability (see Figure 5.4). Many other slides in the presentation indicate that the presenters were not trying to protect the young woman in the center from overuse and addiction; their goal was to advise other Facebook employees on how to keep her “engaged” for longer with rewards, novelty, and emotions. Suggestions include making it easier for teens to open multiple accounts and implementing “stronger paths to related in...

Agency arises from striving to individuate and expand the self and involves qualities such as efficiency, competence, and assertiveness. Communion arises from striving to integrate the self in a larger social unit through caring for others and involves qualities such as benevolence, cooperativeness, and empathy.29

Researchers have long found that boys and men are more focused on agency strivings while girls and women are more focused on communion strivings.

Socially prescribed perfectionism is closely related to anxiety; people who suffer from anxiety are more prone to it. Being a perfectionist also increases your anxiety because you fear the shame of public failure from everything you do.

The authors conclude that “social comparison takes place outside awareness and affects explicit self-evaluations.”

Facebook itself commissioned a study on how Instagram was affecting teens in the United States and the U.K. The findings were never released, but whistleblower Frances Haugen smuggled out screenshots of internal documents and shared them with reporters at The Wall Street Journal. The researchers found that Instagram is particularly bad for girls: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression …. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”44 The researchers also noted that “social comparison is worse” on Instagram than on rival apps. Snapchat’s filters “keep the focus on the face,” whereas Instagram “focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle.”

The second twist was that depression spread only from women. When a woman became depressed, it increased the odds of depression in her close friends (male and female) by 142%. When a man became depressed, it had no measurable effect on his friends.

Asher, a TikTok influencer who describes themself as one of a “system” of 29 identities, has amassed more than 1.1 million followers. The growing interest in DID is further evidenced by the billions of views garnered by hashtags such as #did (2.8 billion), #dissociativeidentitydisorder (1.6 billion), and #didsystem (1.1 billion).66 Naomi Torres-Mackie, the head of research at the Mental Health Coalition, encapsulated the trend this way: “All of a sudden, all of my adolescent patients think that they have [DID] …. And they don’t.”67

as Reeves puts it, “a world of floundering men is unlikely to be a world of flourishing women.”11

Durkheim argued that Homo sapiens could just as well be called Homo duplex, or two-level man, for we exist on two very different levels. We spend most of our lives as individuals pursuing our own interests. He called this the realm of the “profane,” which means the ordinary day-to-day world where we are very concerned about our own wealth, health, and reputation. But Durkheim showed that nearly all societies have created rituals and communal practices for pulling people “up,” temporarily, into the realm of the sacred, where the self recedes and collective interests predominate. Think of Christians singing hymns together every Sunday in church; think of Muslims circling the Kaaba in Mecca; think of civil rights marchers singing as they walked. Evidence that these two levels are available to everyone, even outside a religious context, can be found in the ways that fans of sports teams use similar techniques to bind themselves together before a game with pep rallies, the singing of fight songs, and shared consciousness alteration (usually from alcohol), along with a variety of quasi-religious rituals, superstitions, and body markings.3 It is a thrill to be one of thousands of fans in a stadium, all singing and stomping in unison after each goal or touchdown. Durkheim called this state of energized communion “collective effervescence.”

Self-transcendence is among the central features of spiritual experience, and it turns out that the loss of self has a neural signature. There is a set of linked structures in the brain that are more active whenever we are processing events from an egocentric point of view—thinking about what I want, what I need to do next, or what other people think of me. These brain structures are so often active together that they are collectively called the default mode network (DMN), meaning it is what the brain is usually doing, except in the special times when it is not.17 We might call it the profane mode network. Research has found that the DMN is less active when people engage in a variety of spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer, and the use of psychedelic drugs (in supportive settings) such as psilocybin, which is the class of drugs the world’s indigenous religions most widely use.18 In his 2023 book, Awe, the social psychologist Dacher Keltner wrote,

The Tao Te Ching lists “ideas of right and wrong” as a bedevilment. In my 35 years of studying moral psychology, I have come to see this as one of humanity’s greatest problems: We are too quick to anger and too slow to forgive. We are also hypocrites who judge others harshly while automatically justifying our own bad behavior.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

Awe can be triggered in many ways, but the beauty of nature is among the most reliable and accessible methods. After hearing Dacher in a podcast conversation31 describe the “awe walks” he took while grieving his brother’s death from cancer, I decided to add a session on awe and beauty to the undergraduate Flourishing class that I teach at New York University. I told my students to listen to the podcast and then take a walk, slowly, anywhere outside, during which they must not take out their phones. The written reflections they turned in for that week’s homework were among the most beautiful I’ve seen in my 30 years as a professor.

It matters what we expose ourselves to. On this the ancients universally agree. Here is Buddha: “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts.”37 And here is Marcus Aurelius: “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.”38

Lenore is the author of the 2009 book Free-Range Kids,

Why would anyone treat their customers that way? Because the users are not really the customers for most social media companies. When platforms offer access to information or services for free, it’s usually because the users are the product. Their attention is a precious substance that companies extract and sell to their paying customers—the advertisers. The companies are competing against each other for users’ attention, and, like gambling casinos, they’ll do anything to hold on to their users even if they harm them in the process. We need to change the incentives so that companies behave differently, as has happened in many other industries. Think of food safety regulations in the Progressive Era, or automotive safety regulations in the 1960s, both of which contributed to the long-running decline in children’s mortality rates.2

In an attention economy, there’s only so much attention and the advertising business model always wants more. So, it becomes a race to the bottom of the brainstem …. It starts small. First to get your attention, I add slot machine “pull to refresh” rewards which create little addictions. I remove stopping cues for “infinite scroll” so your mind forgets when to do something else. But then that’s not enough. As attention gets more competitive, we have to crawl deeper down the brainstem to your identity and get you addicted to getting attention from other people. By adding the number of followers and likes, technology hacks our social validation and now people are obsessed with the constant feedback they get from others. This helped fuel a mental health crisis for teenagers.