Beverly Hills medical doctor, Dr. Brian, shares his experience with social media addiction in his new book.

Dr. Brian Boxer Wachler tried and failed to live a double life. To his family and colleagues, he was a dad, husband, and practicing medical doctor in Beverly Hills. But online, he was growing a following. Through his explosive rise on Tik Tok, Dr. Brian started his path as an influencer.

Dr. Brian, like many, started making Tik Toks during the pandemic after some convincing from his daughters. After getting familiar with the platform, he quickly found a way to use his research “superpowers” to combat misinformation commonly spread on the app.

“As a doctor, I’m here to help people,” Dr. Brian said. “… When it started to really develop, my mindset was this is just another way of helping a broad community of people, millions and millions that are out there relying on at the very least, wrong information that may lead to disappointing results, but at the very worst, harmful results. I felt obligated to keep up this developing platform for that reason.”

Dr. Brian’s account got attention quickly, now sitting at around 3 million followers. But he found that with this success came unhealthy habits and even addiction to the platform.

“For me, the feeling of having those videos getting hundreds of thousands and millions of views was quite exhilarating,” Dr. Brian said. “… I was so involved with social media, particularly Tik Tok, which was the source of my addiction, that I would come home and be working and answering the comments and researching videos and doing other things than an influencer does, and [I] basically ignored my children.”

He describes how it got to the point where his children would resent him coming home from work because he would be so absorbed in his online life. He also mentions how the addiction put strains on his relationship with his wife.

This all culminated in his family having an intervention. After one of his videos got taken down for violating community guidelines and his account was suspended for two weeks, he went into a sort of withdrawal and realized he had been “under the influence as an influencer.”

“I had an epiphany of ‘Oh my gosh, what have I been doing?” Dr. Brian said. “What am I doing to my family? And then I had this real sadness and remorse and I remember crying.”

After he started his recovery from social media addiction, Dr. Brian dedicated himself to educating others about the harmful influences of social media in his new book “Influenced: The Impact of Social Media on Our Perception.”

“I wrote the book as a 911 call to action,” Dr. Brian said. “I’m a Beverly Hills medical doctor with over 3 million followers, yet I have a flaw. I easily became addicted to social media, and if this happened to me, then it is very likely that it can happen to a lot of people. That’s the reason I took it upon myself to do the research and then also be transparent about my own experience.”

Dr. Brian, who has teenage daughters himself, expresses particular concern with young people using social media. He focuses multiple chapters in the book on the fact that since children’s and teens’ brains are not fully developed, it is easier for them to be influenced by what they see on social media.

“Their brains are still developing their frontal cortex until about age 22 or 25, so they are particularly more vulnerable to these types of influences,” Dr. Brian said. “They are still learning how to make decisions. They’re still learning about critical thinking skills, and they’re the most susceptible.”

He cites challenges on social media involving lighting things on fire or consuming dangerous chemicals that have led to injury and death. His book also tackles the issues of bullying on social media and how online platforms can increase our political divides.

In his book, Dr. Brian interviews influencers to get their perspectives on the effects of social media. Dr. Brian himself maintains that there is a lot of good in social media, it just needs to be managed properly.

“The addiction is like taking a match to a dry forest, and it just consumes you and you don’t even know it,” Dr. Brian said. “So the question is how do we fix it? Well, how did we deal with the tobacco industry? Through legislation and litigation.”

Dr. Brian advocates for there to be more responsibility for social media companies for the content that appears on their platforms and for legislation to roll back current protections they currently have.

Ultimately, the goal of Dr. Brian’s book is not to shame social media but to teach people how to successfully manage it.

“I wanted to help people understand social media, from someone who knows the research and did the research but also has direct experience being an influencer and being able to help people navigate successfully,” Dr. Brian said. “…It is based on my experience, experiences of the other influencers I interviewed, and also the research on how we can live successfully with social media.”