July 2026, Volume 4, Issue 7

Author

Sudharsan S, Hemalatha N R, Anand K S S and Vidya R

Abstract

Background: The current digital environment gives continuous, fast accessible, and easy happiness as rewards through social media sites. Like this frequent over exposure to easy and fast rewards may subside the natural motivation given by cognitively effortful tasks like studying, by repeatedly stimulating the brain±s dopaminergic reward systems. This is known as "Reward Hijack". This trend of hijack is currently applicable to the youth of this country who should be focussing on study related effort, but instead they focus more on social media, for instant gratification. Objectives: To find the association between Social Media Over usage and Study related effort sensitivity among Medical and Paramedical students in India. Materials and Methods: This is a cross sectional study, which is based on Questionnaire and was conducted on 175 MBBS and 100 Paramedical students. Pearson±s correlation coefficient was used to analyse data to determine the relationship overuse and study related effort sensitivity. Ethical clearance was obtained and Informed consent was got from all the participants. Results: The results showed that the mean social media overuse score was 3.18 ± 0.82, and the mean effort sensitivity score was 3.52 ± 0.74. These two variables suggest a moderate negative correlation (r = -0.41, p = 0.0002), which indicate that higher social media usage was associated with decreased motivation and sensitivity toward study related effort. Conclusion: The study±s findings shows, continuous exposure to rapid and easy rewards given by social media will hijack the brain±s reward system and decrease interest in delayed but truthful academic rewards. Such reward hijacks could be prevented by conducting awareness programmes and teaching strategies to come out of the social media usage.