Effects of Social Media Stress on Teens

When it comes to fighting for heart health, Black Americans have been at the forefront. As early as 1893, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the world’s first successful heart surgery. Since then, Black physicians, advocates, and organizations have continued the work of educating Black communities about heart disease and prevention. Still, often, when we think about heart health in our community, we usually paint a picture of adults’ cholesterol levels and blood pressure, totally forgetting the future of the Black community, which are our teenagers.

Black teens are living in a highly stressful and social-media-pressured world, which affects not only their emotions but also their bodies. The American Psychological Association reports that the long-term effects of this stress are heart attack, stroke, and hypertension. A report from the AFRO American Newspaper shows that Black teens in the US use social media more than their white counterparts, with 9 in 10 Black teens using Snapchat when compared to 7 in 10 white teens.

Anxiety, stress, sadness, and depression are some known outcomes of frequent use of social media, according to a report from the National Library of Medicine. The American Heart Association opines that these outcomes are also known to cause heart attack, stroke, and heart failure. It is not surprising that a 2017 report by MedicalXpress showed that people have higher heart rate and blood pressure after using the internet.

As the conversation around stress and social media usage keeps growing, we must speak up on how stress affects us physically and how social media use is affecting Black teens. Let this February, American Heart Month, serve as a timely reminder that healthy habits formed early among Black teens can protect their hearts for a lifetime.

Chronic Stress Affects the Body, Not Just Emotions

Stress is the body’s response to challenges. When we experience stress in small doses, it can be beneficial. Still, when it becomes constant for a teenager juggling between schools, online life, family responsibilities, and social expectations, it can take a toll on their physical and emotional health.

Medical News Today reports that when the body is under a lot of stress, it releases stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol at a rate it shouldn’t. The effect of this can be:

increased heart rate
raised blood pressure
disruption in the normal heart rhythm
distribution of inflammation in the body

Since the bodies and brains of our teens are still developing, long-term stress exposure can set the stage for cardiovascular risk later. The destination of stress is not the mind; it travels through the nervous system and bloodstream and resides in the heart.

How Social Media Pressure Impacts Sleep and Blood Pressure

Black teens often experience online racial discrimination and bias on social media platforms, compared to their white counterparts. This increases their stress and anxiety. Social media algorithms don’t help as they often expose our youth to race-related negative content, thereby worsening the state of their mental health. Since our teens use social media at a higher rate, they are more exposed to stress-inducing content.

However, everything about social media isn’t all bad. Social media has become a central part of many Black teens’ everyday lives, where they connect, create, and express themselves. But these come with a price:

Constant comparison
Fear of missing out
Pressure to outperform others

Because of this, many Black teens feel the need to stay up even at midnight so that they can connect with others, respond to messages, scroll feeds, and worry about how they are perceived online. The excessive use of social media has been linked to reduced sleep quality among teenagers and has opened the door to multiple sleep-related issues, according to the Sleep Foundation.

According to CardioVascular Health Clinic, poor or insufficient sleep is linked to:

Increased blood pressure
Increased stress hormone
Elevated risk of anxiety and depression
Difficulty regulating emotion and focus
Increased blood sugar
Heart disease risk

In addition to all these, it is compounded by online stress such as cyberbullying, negative comments, and pressure to maintain a certain online status, putting the body in unnecessary high alert and making the nervous system unable to relax, hence the heart works harder than it needs to. Research in ScienceDirect has pointed to poor sleep and other prevalent behaviors as the reason for increased cardiovascular risk among Black teens.

Why Teen Heart Health Belongs in the Conversation

This year’s American Heart Month offers an opportunity for to broaden our conversations about heart health and extend them beyond where Dr. Daniel Hale Williams left off. Black teens must to be part of the conversation.

As Eldrin Lewis, a cardiologist and heart failure specialist at Stanford Medicine notes, “When it comes to your heart, knowing your numbers is the first step.”

But whose numbers are we counting? We have long focused on diet and exercise metrics for older adults, while overlooking how our teenagers are faring. What are the numbers for stress, sleep, emotional safety, and environmental concerns that Black teens navigate every day?

We must examine the connection between social media, stress, and the heart, primarily as it also affects the next generation. We must know our numbers to help parents, educators, and health professionals help Black teens who are already disproportionately hit by heart disease when compared to white teens. Tulane University News reports that Black people in the US have a 54% chance of dying from cardiovascular disease than whites.

Our discussion should also be on how to support teens in developing healthier habits, both online and offline, such as:

Regular physical activity
Quality sleep routines
Open conversations
Boundaries around screen time
Separating online validation from self-worth
The use of social media as a tool, not a scoreboard
Practice of digital confidence and safety

Finally, we must have dedicated Black feeds by Black content creators that protect mental and emotional health. At Elevate Black Health, we believe that a teenager with a healthy dose of self-worth will not seek validation from people online or offline. Hence, they’ll stress less and enjoy better heart health.

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