compulsive internet use

For decades, the image of teenage rebellion has been linked to the bottle, secret tobacco or the first joint you take. However, young Spaniards are currently greatly reducing the consumption of these productsalthough to replace it they are choosing to have a quite compulsive addiction to the internet or to the scroll infinite in some applications like, for example, TikTok.

The decline of alcohol and tobacco. The data that gives us joy regarding the most harmful consumption among our young people comes from the survey STUDIES 2025 prepared by the Ministry of Health through the National Plan on Drugs. Here you can see how, while in 1994 81.4% of young people between 14 and 18 years old admitted to having tried alcohol on some occasion, now in 2025 this figure has fallen to 73.9%, with consumption in the last 30 days standing at 51.8% of cases.

If we focus on both alcohol and cannabis, we also observe all-time lows in consumption in the age group between 14 and 18 years. Although the current problem is focused on flavored vapers or electronic cigarettes, which do have a large presence in this age group compared to the attempts made to regulate it.

The new drug. If we were left with only this half of the photograph, we might think that today’s teenagers are simply the healthiest in history. But here the same Ministry of Health, via another report of research, points to the relationship between young people and technology, which explains, in part, why they spend less time on the street drinking bottles or trying tobacco. In this way, there are several important data here:

• 19.4% of students aged 14 to 18 have problematic use of the Internet.
• 15.3% show clear signs of problems with social networks, trapped in addictive design mechanics, which is what we know as doomscrolling.
• 5.2% present symptoms compatible with video game addiction, something that has also been motivated by the famous ‘loot boxes’ that promote addiction to games of chance, since if they are looking for a specific aesthetic change, they must be lucky to find it in a virtual box or envelope.

We have a great challenge. What these reports tell us is nothing more than that the problem that we suffered in our youth has mutated and has been updated to something much more modern and difficult to detect. Before, the smell of tobacco was a clear sign that something was happening, but today a teenager may be developing a severe addiction locked in his room, while his parents think he is just “on his cell phone.”

This has meant that public policies are now focused on this type of addiction, also with some measures that are already being heard, such as the veto on access to social networks. to minors under 16 years of age in our country to control these addictive practices that the applications try to reinforce.

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