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

by Jonathan Haidt

While the reward-seeking parts of the brain mature earlier, the frontal cortex—essential for self-control, delay of gratification, and resistance to temptation—is not up to full capacity until the mid-20s, and preteens are at a particularly vulnerable point in development.

As they begin puberty, they are often socially insecure, easily swayed by peer pressure, and easily lured by any activity that seems to offer social validation.

Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and—as I will show—unsuitable for children and adolescents.

Gen Z teens got sucked into spending many hours of each day scrolling through the shiny happy posts of friends, acquaintances, and distant influencers.

My central claim in this book is that these two trends—overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.

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]

The Anxious Generation is a book about how to reclaim human life for human beings in all generations.

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.

I know that adolescents with anxiety or depressive disorders can’t just “snap out of it” or decide to “toughen up.”

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

Canada also largely avoided the effects of the global financial crisis.[45] Yet even with all these advantages, adolescents in Canada experienced a sharp decline in mental health at the same time and in the same way as those in the United States.[46]

“a social-validation feedback loop . . . exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”[26]

When a family moves to a new country, the kids who are 12 or younger will quickly become native speakers with no accent,

negative correlation between social media use and satisfaction with life was larger for those in the 10–15 age group than for those in the 16–21 age group, or any other age bracket.[35]

Stress wood is a perfect metaphor for children, who also need to experience frequent stressors in order to become strong adults.

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.

Well-intentioned parents who try to raise their children in a bubble of satisfaction, protected from frustration, consequences, and negative emotions, may be harming their children.

Conversely, children who are raised in a protected greenhouse sometimes become incapacitated by anxiety before they reach maturity.

Sleep-deprived teens cannot concentrate, focus, or remember as well as teens who get sufficient sleep.[27] Their learning and their grades suffer.

They are more irritable and anxious throughout the day, so their relationships suffer.

“Sensitiveness to immediately exciting sensorial stimuli characterizes the attention of childhood

Studies show that adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are heavier users of smartphones and video games,

It appears so.[49] A Dutch longitudinal study found that young people who engaged in more problematic (addictive) social media use at one measurement time had stronger ADHD symptoms at the next measurement time.[50] Another study by a different group of Dutch researchers used a similar design and also found evidence suggesting that heavy media multitasking caused later attention problems, but they found this causal effect only among younger adolescents (ages 11–13), and it was especially strong for girls.

The reason is that the brain adapts to long periods of elevated dopamine by changing itself in a variety of ways to maintain homeostasis.

spend on social media doesn’t tell you much, unless they say that they are heavy users. It’s only when boys are spending more than two hours a day that the curve begins to rise.

The lure is the promise of connecting with friends—enticing for girls who have strong needs for communion—but the reality is that girls are plunged into a strange new world in which our ancient evolved programming for real-world communities misfires continuously.

It is often said these days that “data is the new oil.” But so is attention.

everything, everywhere, all the time, for free? Maybe it’s because it’s not healthy for any human being to have unfettered access to everything, everywhere, all the time, for free.

That, I believe, is what has happened to Gen Z. They are less able than any generation in history to put down roots in real-world communities populated by known individuals who will still be there a year later.

As with social media for girls, spending hours “connecting” with others online produces an increase in the quantity of social interactions and a decrease in the quality of social relationships.

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.

The strongest and most satisfying communities come into being when something lifts people out of the lower level so that they have powerful collective experiences.

Many spiritual practices are amplified by bodies in motion and in proximity.

Studies on Buddhist monks suggest that their intense meditation practices alter their brains in lasting ways, decreasing activation in brain areas related to fear and negative emotionality.

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.

“Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye?”

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.

Of course, religion has at times motivated people to be cruel, racist, and genocidal.

From a spiritual perspective, social media is a disease of the mind. Spiritual practices and virtues, such as forgiveness, grace, and love, are a cure.

In this world, hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law,

Awe opens us to changing our beliefs, allegiances, and behaviors.

Awe causes “shifts in neurophysiology, a diminished focus on the self, increased prosocial relationality, greater social integration, and a heightened sense of meaning.”

The virtual world, in contrast, gives no structure to time or space and is entirely profane. This is one reason why virtual communities are not usually as satisfying or meaning-giving as real-world communities.

Awe in nature may be especially valuable for Gen Z because it counteracts the anxiety and self-consciousness caused by a phone-based childhood.

any company that truly verifies the ages of its new users will lose preteens to their competitors, who have no qualms about illegally fishing for underage users.

As a result, companies that make products used by adolescents are trapped in another race to the bottom, a race to get younger and younger users.

Technology designers long ago learned that reducing friction or effort increases time spent, so features like autoplay and infinite scroll encourage increased consumption of content in an automatic, zombie-like way.

There is a Polynesian expression: “Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.” Sometimes it is better to do a big thing rather than many small things, and sometimes the big thing is unnoticed but right underfoot.

is standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.

They are like racehorses stuck in the stable. It’s time to let them out.