Brainrot, Addiction, Depression: The Truth We Don't Know About TikTok

How much time do you spend scrolling every day? An hour? Two? More?

Ten years ago, an entertainment format like watching short videos on social media didn't even exist. Yet as of February 2026, TikTok alone has around 1.9 billion active users on its platform. But along with the bright visuals and endless feed of content came declines in attention, memory, and analytical ability.

How TikTok affects teenagers' mental health, and what to do about endless scrolling — read this article by Alina Tuz, director of the Kyiv school Kiterra, for DeTalks.

A Short History of TikTok

The short-form video format (also known as SFV) was invented in China. In 2016, the company ByteDance released the app Douyin, which looked just like TikTok, only with Chinese characters. Short videos became so popular in China that, a year later in 2017, TikTok appeared — the international version of Douyin.

The app quickly gained users, despite the fact that its owners had to fend off class-action lawsuits over promoting pornography to children and stealing personal data. The 2020 lockdowns brought the app global dominance — the top spot for downloads on the App Store and Google Play.

How SFV Affects Teenagers' Minds and Mental Health

The Benefits

Every phenomenon has two sides, a dark one and a light one, so TikTok shouldn't be demonized outright. Bright, dynamic videos help people absorb new information. When the platform extended video length to 10 minutes in 2022, TikTok started competing with YouTube in educational and analytical content.

Research shows that adults often use reels to learn something new — how to tie a tie, or chop an onion quickly, for instance. And active discussions in the comments help both individuals and communities grow.

But unlike adults, teenagers tend toward passive consumption of entertainment videos rather than learning. In particular, 2025 saw a wave of meta-studies on how SFV affects teenagers' cognitive abilities and mental health.

The Downsides

• 'Brain rot.' Excessive scrolling inevitably leads to declines in attention, memory, and analytical ability. The American Psychological Association has even coined a specific term for it: 'brain rot.' The brain gets used to rapid shifts in visual stimuli and starts to 'get bored' during long reading or studying.
  
  Because of this, it becomes hard to focus, hard to hold a single thought, and hard to find the energy to analyze, compare, or question things. It's far easier to ignore complex tasks and switch to 'easy pleasure' instead.

• Short video addiction. In February 2026, the European Union accused TikTok of violating the Digital Services Act, arguing that the platform's design was fostering addiction in children.
  
  The complaint pointed to features like infinite scroll, autoplay, and an 'overly personalized recommendation system' that feeds content based on user preferences.
  
  These design features amplify the urge to scroll and put the brain into 'autopilot mode.' In effect, the platform builds a dependency similar to gambling addiction.
  

MRI studies have even shown that active users show changes in the structure of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Because of this, the brain becomes hypersensitive to instant rewards (dopamine), while the capacity for planning deteriorates. The prefrontal cortex, which governs self-control, also changes. As a result, people who can't delay gratification become much easier to manipulate.

Anxiety and Depression: What the Numbers Say

'Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?' — every teenager has asked their reflection some version of this question for millennia. After all, young people's central task is fitting in, finding a place in society, finding their people.

Whether constantly comparing yourself to 'perfect' influencers and watching endless stories of 'successful success' actually helps with that is a rhetorical question. Teenagers who actively use social media themselves report symptoms of depression. Even the basic mechanism of romantic attraction isn't spared: young people increasingly replace real dates with watching videos about relationships.

Loneliness and self-isolation push people toward an even bigger dose of entertainment content. And there's no guarantee it'll even be funny. What if the feed serves up a sad story instead? The rapid shift in content, from funny to frightening to tragic, only deepens 'emotional exhaustion.'

In that case, people need to comfort themselves again and 'rest' on their phone. Click, and the loop known as the 'dopamine loop' closes. For what it's worth, from 2010 to 2020, teen suicide rates rose by an average of 150% across English-speaking countries. That's exactly when mobile phones and round-the-clock internet access became widespread.

What to Do: Lessons From Other Countries

People have invented plenty of things that make life easier. Plastic, for instance. For decades, bottles, toys, and bags were mass-produced and thrown away by the ton. Only once rivers, forests, and land turned into dumping grounds did people wake up and start limiting production and recycling waste.

The same thing is happening with short-form social video. No one knew how the new format would affect society until, nine years after TikTok's launch, researchers gathered enough evidence that scrolling leads to 'brain rot.'

The way out of this trap resembles solving environmental problems: limiting consumption. Experts recommend capping social media use at 30 minutes a day.

China, for instance, took steps early on to protect its population's mental and cognitive health. On Douyin, users under 18 are limited to a maximum of 40 minutes a day, and thanks to censorship, the share of educational, patriotic, and socially useful content is significantly higher. Australia, meanwhile, banned users under 16 from creating social media accounts, starting in December 2024.

Now it's other countries' turn to protect the next generation's minds.