How Are The Pressures of NIL And Social Media Impacting Student-Athlete Mental Health — And Are Universities Prepared For It?
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How Might Social Media and the Pressures to Earn NIL Income Impact a Student-Athlete's Mental Health? And Are Universities Prepared For It? (Part I of II)
Executive Summary
The initial headlines on NIL are focused on the fortunate few landing tangible NIL compensation
Student-athletes, like broader population of social media users, live in an “attention economy”
Social media usage is designed to be addictive according to medical practitioners
Trends in drug and alcohol use among the millennial generation has decreased, while the amount of time spent attending to smartphone activity continues to climb.
Social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram incentivize individuals to monetize their followers
Social media’s reinforcing nature including users craving for “likes” and comments to their posts could be expanded to student-athletes search for acceptance and self-worth in the form of NIL compensation
The Other Side of NIL Hysteria
The fanfare that trumpeted the start of the name/image/likeness (NIL) sponsorship era was rife with quick reactions and hot takes to the NIL deals, both small and large, being announced.
TikTok sensations, Fresno State University women’s basketball stars and twin sisters Haley and Hannah Cavinder announced on July 1 major sponsorship deals with Boost Mobile and Six Star Nutrition. D’Eriq King, football student-athlete at University of Miami, landed a handful of deals including with College Hunks Hauling Junk & Moving and Murphy Auto Group. Scores of other student-athletes across the country have announced deals of all shapes and sizes, with most smaller and more modest in scale and scope.
Now that the echoes from the shot-gun start are starting to dissipate, is anyone talking about what happens when student-athletes don’t receive many (if any) offers allowing them to capitalize off their NIL?
What about the teammates of the Cavinders and King whose phones aren’t ringing?
Although the NIL era is still in its infancy and hard data on NIL transactions will be more reliable in the months and years ahead, it is reasonable to conclude based on research tied to social media usage, self-image, peer pressure, and financial pressures from family members that NIL could play an underlying role in exacerbating the mental health and well-being of college athletes— especially when compensation doesn't appear in their Venmo or Paypal accounts.
Social Media Usage is High Amongst College Students; NIL Deals Could Thrive (for some) on Social Media
According to an article published by The McLean Hospital, an affiliate with Harvard Medical School, social media has a reinforcing nature; using it activates the brain’s reward center by releasing dopamine, a “feel-good chemical” linked to pleasurable activities such as sex, food, and social interaction. The platforms are designed to be addictive and are associated with anxiety, depression, and even physical ailments.
According to the Pew Research Center, 69% of adults and 81% of teens in the U.S. use social media. More than 98% of college-aged students use social media, says consumer insight service Experian Simmons. According to Boradbandsearch.net, people ages 18-34 use Facebook more than 1,000 minutes per month while Instagram reaches 65% of people aged 18-34 and each user spends around 350 minutes on the site per month.
To boost self-esteem and feel a sense of belonging in their social circles, people post content with the hope of receiving positive feedback. Couple that content with an app designed to lure you in with the promise of a potential future reward— i.e., "likes" on the things you post— and you create the cycle of constantly opening apps and scrolling through platforms.
When reviewing others’ social activity, people tend to make comparisons such as, “Did I get as many likes as someone else?,” or “Why didn’t this person like my post, but this other person did?” Social media users end up searching for validation on the internet, using that as a replacement for meaningful connection they might otherwise make in real life.
Ostensibly, users who are already used to comparing the likes, retweets and comments they receive on social media could easily make the mental leap to wondering: "How much money are they getting for that sponsored tweet?" and "What types of companies are reaching out to my teammate because of their social media presence or following?"
FOMO—fear of missing out—also could be important variable here. If everyone else is using social media sites, and if someone else doesn’t join in, there’s concern that the absent party will miss jokes, connections, or invitations. Take that one step further where social media becomes a student-athlete's NIL breadwinner -- how do student-athletes feel when their social media posts are not garnering the amount of traffic their teammates' accounts are drawing?
A 2018 British study tied social media use to decreased, disrupted, and delayed sleep, which is associated with depression, memory loss, and poor academic performance. Social media use can impact users’ physical health even more directly; researchers have found that the connection between the mind and the gut can turn anxiety and depression into nausea, headaches, muscle tension, and tremors.
When the Number of Social Media Followers Shapes a Student-Athlete’s Self-Worth
As the 2021-22 academic year and corresponding sports seasons begin in earnest across the country this August, it will be interesting to see how media and even play-by-play and color analysts to social media feeds will weave in a student-athlete's NIL activities and social media statistics for the most popular and in-demand student-athletes into the coverage of college sports generally.
What happens when student-athletes have little or no reach via social media? How will student-athletes feel if a teammate is reaping NIL attention and financial spoils and they aren’t?
The Atlantic reported on the very direct ways in which individuals, including student-athletes, could try to monetizing their social media following, emphasizing that the number of followers one has on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or other platforms has a direct correlation to financial success in the NIL era:
“Twitter already has a digital “tip jar” for users who want to accept money from anyone who likes their tweets. It’s meant to replace the tradition of replying to your own viral tweet with a Venmo link, and it signals—even more so than the ads in your feed—that Twitter is a site of commerce. Another feature, soon to be released, will let popular people charge a subscription fee for access to their exclusive bonus tweets. On Instagram, people have been selling access to their 'Close Friends' stories since 2018. The platform doesn’t directly facilitate that kind of transaction, but in nearly every other way imaginable, it has turned influencer profiles into so many online malls.”
The “Attention Economy”
In a study entitled “It’s Time to Confront Student Mental Health Issues Associated with Smartphones and Social Media” published in September 2018 by the American Journal on Pharmaceutical Education, Dr. Jeff Cain of the University of Kentucky College of Pharmacy noted that one major concern for psychologists and digital media experts is the propensity toward addiction in today’s “attention economy.” In their efforts to capture the attention (and market share) of users, device and app developers may have unwittingly (or in some cases, intentionally) designed their apps for addiction, using psychological tricks to develop a craving for the instantaneous “highs” of texts, social media “likes,” comments, etc.
Notably, the trends in drug and alcohol use among the millennial generation has decreased, while the amount of time spent attending to smartphone activity continues to climb. This has led some researchers to suggest that those susceptible to addiction have simply shifted to a new drug: smartphones.
Responding to dings, banners, symbols, and other notification alerts has been shown to be very similar to effects of casino slot machines. Neuroimaging studies show that Internet addiction (of which smartphone and social media addictions are a subset) shows similar increases in activity in brain regions associated with substance-related addictions. One disturbing research finding related to the issue of addiction is that the mere presence of a smartphone reduces cognitive capacity by keeping the user on “alert,” which ultimately adds to the potential psychological toll of the device.
While issues with stress, anxiety, and depression are difficult to detect on the surface, it is relatively easy to recognize social media users with some form of digital addictions. Most of us can probably envision an individual who is tethered to their phone, always keeping it in sight and checking it relentlessly, despite being in the presence of or in conversations with others. It is also not difficult to picture the image of young adults who browse their phone while lying in bed at night, monitoring it for texts and social media notifications throughout the night before immediately reaching for and checking it in the morning.
Dr. Cain notes it is not yet clear whether smartphone and social media use leads to mental health issues directly or whether individuals vulnerable to mental health issues are more susceptible to use these technologies as a coping mechanism which in turn exacerbates the problems. We are just now entering an era in which anxiety and depression are major threats to the greater student population’s academic success and overall wellness; it will take time to unravel all the causes and potential solutions.
While there is much more is to be learned, enough is currently known to begin making our students aware of the connections between mental health and smartphones. How the pressure and constant craving to track social media engagement with one's NIL endorsement delivered by a tweet or Instagram post may be an extension to the drawbacks with smartphone usage by college students. Dr. Cain noted that digital technology is here to stay, therefore incorporating information regarding digital afflictions would be useful in university-based wellness education and mental health initiatives.
Stay tuned for Part II in this series, coming to your inbox on Tuesday, July 20.
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