the impact of social media on mental health opinion essay

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Social media harms teens’ mental health, mounting evidence shows. what now.

Understanding what is going on in teens’ minds is necessary for targeted policy suggestions

Most teens use social media, often for hours on end. Some social scientists are confident that such use is harming their mental health. Now they want to pinpoint what explains the link.

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By Sujata Gupta

February 20, 2024 at 7:30 am

In January, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, appeared at a congressional hearing to answer questions about how social media potentially harms children. Zuckerberg opened by saying: “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health.”

But many social scientists would disagree with that statement. In recent years, studies have started to show a causal link between teen social media use and reduced well-being or mood disorders, chiefly depression and anxiety.

Ironically, one of the most cited studies into this link focused on Facebook.

Researchers delved into whether the platform’s introduction across college campuses in the mid 2000s increased symptoms associated with depression and anxiety. The answer was a clear yes , says MIT economist Alexey Makarin, a coauthor of the study, which appeared in the November 2022 American Economic Review . “There is still a lot to be explored,” Makarin says, but “[to say] there is no causal evidence that social media causes mental health issues, to that I definitely object.”

The concern, and the studies, come from statistics showing that social media use in teens ages 13 to 17 is now almost ubiquitous. Two-thirds of teens report using TikTok, and some 60 percent of teens report using Instagram or Snapchat, a 2022 survey found. (Only 30 percent said they used Facebook.) Another survey showed that girls, on average, allot roughly 3.4 hours per day to TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, compared with roughly 2.1 hours among boys. At the same time, more teens are showing signs of depression than ever, especially girls ( SN: 6/30/23 ).

As more studies show a strong link between these phenomena, some researchers are starting to shift their attention to possible mechanisms. Why does social media use seem to trigger mental health problems? Why are those effects unevenly distributed among different groups, such as girls or young adults? And can the positives of social media be teased out from the negatives to provide more targeted guidance to teens, their caregivers and policymakers?

“You can’t design good public policy if you don’t know why things are happening,” says Scott Cunningham, an economist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

Increasing rigor

Concerns over the effects of social media use in children have been circulating for years, resulting in a massive body of scientific literature. But those mostly correlational studies could not show if teen social media use was harming mental health or if teens with mental health problems were using more social media.

Moreover, the findings from such studies were often inconclusive, or the effects on mental health so small as to be inconsequential. In one study that received considerable media attention, psychologists Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski combined data from three surveys to see if they could find a link between technology use, including social media, and reduced well-being. The duo gauged the well-being of over 355,000 teenagers by focusing on questions around depression, suicidal thinking and self-esteem.

Digital technology use was associated with a slight decrease in adolescent well-being , Orben, now of the University of Cambridge, and Przybylski, of the University of Oxford, reported in 2019 in Nature Human Behaviour . But the duo downplayed that finding, noting that researchers have observed similar drops in adolescent well-being associated with drinking milk, going to the movies or eating potatoes.

Holes have begun to appear in that narrative thanks to newer, more rigorous studies.

In one longitudinal study, researchers — including Orben and Przybylski — used survey data on social media use and well-being from over 17,400 teens and young adults to look at how individuals’ responses to a question gauging life satisfaction changed between 2011 and 2018. And they dug into how the responses varied by gender, age and time spent on social media.

Social media use was associated with a drop in well-being among teens during certain developmental periods, chiefly puberty and young adulthood, the team reported in 2022 in Nature Communications . That translated to lower well-being scores around ages 11 to 13 for girls and ages 14 to 15 for boys. Both groups also reported a drop in well-being around age 19. Moreover, among the older teens, the team found evidence for the Goldilocks Hypothesis: the idea that both too much and too little time spent on social media can harm mental health.

“There’s hardly any effect if you look over everybody. But if you look at specific age groups, at particularly what [Orben] calls ‘windows of sensitivity’ … you see these clear effects,” says L.J. Shrum, a consumer psychologist at HEC Paris who was not involved with this research. His review of studies related to teen social media use and mental health is forthcoming in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

Cause and effect

That longitudinal study hints at causation, researchers say. But one of the clearest ways to pin down cause and effect is through natural or quasi-experiments. For these in-the-wild experiments, researchers must identify situations where the rollout of a societal “treatment” is staggered across space and time. They can then compare outcomes among members of the group who received the treatment to those still in the queue — the control group.

That was the approach Makarin and his team used in their study of Facebook. The researchers homed in on the staggered rollout of Facebook across 775 college campuses from 2004 to 2006. They combined that rollout data with student responses to the National College Health Assessment, a widely used survey of college students’ mental and physical health.

The team then sought to understand if those survey questions captured diagnosable mental health problems. Specifically, they had roughly 500 undergraduate students respond to questions both in the National College Health Assessment and in validated screening tools for depression and anxiety. They found that mental health scores on the assessment predicted scores on the screenings. That suggested that a drop in well-being on the college survey was a good proxy for a corresponding increase in diagnosable mental health disorders. 

Compared with campuses that had not yet gained access to Facebook, college campuses with Facebook experienced a 2 percentage point increase in the number of students who met the diagnostic criteria for anxiety or depression, the team found.

When it comes to showing a causal link between social media use in teens and worse mental health, “that study really is the crown jewel right now,” says Cunningham, who was not involved in that research.

A need for nuance

The social media landscape today is vastly different than the landscape of 20 years ago. Facebook is now optimized for maximum addiction, Shrum says, and other newer platforms, such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, have since copied and built on those features. Paired with the ubiquity of social media in general, the negative effects on mental health may well be larger now.

Moreover, social media research tends to focus on young adults — an easier cohort to study than minors. That needs to change, Cunningham says. “Most of us are worried about our high school kids and younger.” 

And so, researchers must pivot accordingly. Crucially, simple comparisons of social media users and nonusers no longer make sense. As Orben and Przybylski’s 2022 work suggested, a teen not on social media might well feel worse than one who briefly logs on. 

Researchers must also dig into why, and under what circumstances, social media use can harm mental health, Cunningham says. Explanations for this link abound. For instance, social media is thought to crowd out other activities or increase people’s likelihood of comparing themselves unfavorably with others. But big data studies, with their reliance on existing surveys and statistical analyses, cannot address those deeper questions. “These kinds of papers, there’s nothing you can really ask … to find these plausible mechanisms,” Cunningham says.

One ongoing effort to understand social media use from this more nuanced vantage point is the SMART Schools project out of the University of Birmingham in England. Pedagogical expert Victoria Goodyear and her team are comparing mental and physical health outcomes among children who attend schools that have restricted cell phone use to those attending schools without such a policy. The researchers described the protocol of that study of 30 schools and over 1,000 students in the July BMJ Open.

Goodyear and colleagues are also combining that natural experiment with qualitative research. They met with 36 five-person focus groups each consisting of all students, all parents or all educators at six of those schools. The team hopes to learn how students use their phones during the day, how usage practices make students feel, and what the various parties think of restrictions on cell phone use during the school day.

Talking to teens and those in their orbit is the best way to get at the mechanisms by which social media influences well-being — for better or worse, Goodyear says. Moving beyond big data to this more personal approach, however, takes considerable time and effort. “Social media has increased in pace and momentum very, very quickly,” she says. “And research takes a long time to catch up with that process.”

Until that catch-up occurs, though, researchers cannot dole out much advice. “What guidance could we provide to young people, parents and schools to help maintain the positives of social media use?” Goodyear asks. “There’s not concrete evidence yet.”

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• Open access
• Published: 06 July 2023

Pros & cons: impacts of social media on mental health

• Ágnes Zsila 1 , 2 &
• Marc Eric S. Reyes   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5280-1315 3  

BMC Psychology volume  11 , Article number:  201 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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The use of social media significantly impacts mental health. It can enhance connection, increase self-esteem, and improve a sense of belonging. But it can also lead to tremendous stress, pressure to compare oneself to others, and increased sadness and isolation. Mindful use is essential to social media consumption.

Social media has become integral to our daily routines: we interact with family members and friends, accept invitations to public events, and join online communities to meet people who share similar preferences using these platforms. Social media has opened a new avenue for social experiences since the early 2000s, extending the possibilities for communication. According to recent research [ 1 ], people spend 2.3 h daily on social media. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat have become increasingly popular among youth in 2022, and one-third think they spend too much time on these platforms [ 2 ]. The considerable time people spend on social media worldwide has directed researchers’ attention toward the potential benefits and risks. Research shows excessive use is mainly associated with lower psychological well-being [ 3 ]. However, findings also suggest that the quality rather than the quantity of social media use can determine whether the experience will enhance or deteriorate the user’s mental health [ 4 ]. In this collection, we will explore the impact of social media use on mental health by providing comprehensive research perspectives on positive and negative effects.

Social media can provide opportunities to enhance the mental health of users by facilitating social connections and peer support [ 5 ]. Indeed, online communities can provide a space for discussions regarding health conditions, adverse life events, or everyday challenges, which may decrease the sense of stigmatization and increase belongingness and perceived emotional support. Mutual friendships, rewarding social interactions, and humor on social media also reduced stress during the COVID-19 pandemic [ 4 ].

On the other hand, several studies have pointed out the potentially detrimental effects of social media use on mental health. Concerns have been raised that social media may lead to body image dissatisfaction [ 6 ], increase the risk of addiction and cyberbullying involvement [ 5 ], contribute to phubbing behaviors [ 7 ], and negatively affects mood [ 8 ]. Excessive use has increased loneliness, fear of missing out, and decreased subjective well-being and life satisfaction [ 8 ]. Users at risk of social media addiction often report depressive symptoms and lower self-esteem [ 9 ].

Overall, findings regarding the impact of social media on mental health pointed out some essential resources for psychological well-being through rewarding online social interactions. However, there is a need to raise awareness about the possible risks associated with excessive use, which can negatively affect mental health and everyday functioning [ 9 ]. There is neither a negative nor positive consensus regarding the effects of social media on people. However, by teaching people social media literacy, we can maximize their chances of having balanced, safe, and meaningful experiences on these platforms [ 10 ].

We encourage researchers to submit their research articles and contribute to a more differentiated overview of the impact of social media on mental health. BMC Psychology welcomes submissions to its new collection, which promises to present the latest findings in the emerging field of social media research. We seek research papers using qualitative and quantitative methods, focusing on social media users’ positive and negative aspects. We believe this collection will provide a more comprehensive picture of social media’s positive and negative effects on users’ mental health.

Data Availability

Not applicable.

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Acknowledgements

Ágnes Zsila was supported by the ÚNKP-22-4 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Culture and Innovation from the source of the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund.

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EDITORIAL article

Editorial: understanding the impact of social media on public mental health and crisis management during the covid-19 pandemic.

• 1 School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China
• 2 School of Public Administration, Hunan University, Changsha, China
• 3 Public Management and Policy Analysis Program, Graduate School of International Relations, International University of Japan, Minamiuonuma, Japan

Editorial on the Research Topic Understanding the impact of social media on public mental health and crisis management during the COVID-19 pandemic

The advent of the digital age has led to changes in the manner and nature of information generation, circulation, and reception. For example, social media connects people through text, pictures, and videos to build a vast social network ( De Paor and Heravi, 2020 ) and significantly influence people's mindset and behaviors ( Liu et al., 2018 ). At the same time, the efficiency of instant information exchange makes social media essential for risk management and responses to hazards, emergencies, and crises ( Brengarth and Mujkic, 2016 ). During the time of crisis, information about the crisis could spread quickly beyond traditional media (e.g., newspapers and television) to social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, and Weibo, at an even more alarming speed ( Martínez-Rojas et al., 2018 ). However, convenient information sharing and fast spreading are usually accompanied by misinformation. The lack of online regulation and the anonymity of users also provide a breeding ground for misinformation, disinformation, social bots, fake news, and rumors. The prevalence of misinformation/disinformation has significantly undermined the full benefits of social media use and brought many challenges to cyberspace security and social order. This could create a hostile internet environment where toxic public opinions, fear, anger, and hate spread quickly ( Zhang et al., 2022 ), which would bring significant obstacles for governments in managing emergencies. Therefore, to understand the public responses and attitudinal dynamics and to promote more effective emergency management during emergencies, this Research Topic examines how social media use impacts people's mental health and government responses to crisis using several studies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has damaged the world economy badly and taken millions of lives in the past 3 years. Studies in this Research Topic are committed to providing fresh evidence and theoretical insights for understanding human mental health and promoting effective crisis management.

During the COVID-19 outbreak, social media has become the essential communication method for isolated people at home, given the concern that the virus could be transmitted quickly in meetings and social gatherings. Information related to COVID-19, medicines, vaccines, and government response measures became the central topic in cyberspace. For example, governments disseminated policy suggestions for people to stay safe and promoted implementing some stringent measures using social media platforms. Besides, social media has been the main channel for isolated individual to seek social support, which is essential for mental and physical health ( Straughan and Xu, 2023 ). The public relied on social media to keep in touch with their friends and relatives, learn how to protect themselves, share views and attitudes, and support one another. The diffusion of all kinds of information (scientific and lay knowledge) on social media highly influences recipients' attitudes, emotions and health practices ( Straughan and Xu, 2022 ). Different knowledge, attitudes, and practices were shared and discussed online, which provides an effective channel for researchers and policymakers to understand the status quo of public mental health and public opinions ( Liu et al., 2020 ). At the same time, during the pandemic, how to use the private data collected and stored on social media for the public's good is a critical issue. Researchers suggest that the big data collected on social media is helpful in allocating resources and providing support to fight against the pandemic and save lives ( Cai et al., 2022 ). Studies of the present Research Topic draw together empirical studies that explore how social media use affects public mental health and emergency management in crisis. Papers on this Research Topic contribute to understanding people's responses, coping with negative emotions, and network conflicts. Beyond the knowledge contribution, researchers also discussed policy implications.

There are five articles in this Research Topic. The topics covered in the present Research Topic include network distribution, social media, sentiment analysis, and public crisis management. More specifically, the papers investigated public reactions and emotional dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic, people's mental health under lockdown conditions, and the impact of social media on social support and public trust. Moreover, the present Research Topic also focused on comparing the impact of social media and traditional media on users' knowledge, attitudes, and health practices and the impact of social media on vaccine acceptance. The five articles examined the main theme of this Research Topic from different perspectives and evidence. We briefly introduce the articles in the next section. The articles are discussed according to the order in which they were published.

Article 1 ( Ma et al. ) collected users' interaction data from the Weibo platform. It examined the multidimensional attributes and characteristics of public sentiment during the outbreak of COVID-19 to meet the increasing demand for public opinion management on social media. The authors combined deep learning, topic clustering, and correlation analysis, and based on large-scale posts and comments, quantitatively analyzed the evolution law of public opinion in time series during the epidemic period and explored the content-based characteristics and audience response characteristics. Specifically, through the analysis of public opinion in the time series, the authors found that the trend of negative public opinion was divided internally, and there were specific window periods. The analysis of the content characteristics of public opinion showed that negative public opinion was more likely to cause public discussion with a larger scale and deep participation. Their analysis of the characteristics of audience response during the period of public opinion demonstrated that the generation of public opinion was independent of posts and users, and the guiding role of opinion leaders was limited. Finding in this paper provides insights for elevating the capacity of public opinion management, effective intervention, and improving the public opinion management system.

Article 2 ( Sun et al. ) focused on the mental health of individuals during the global pandemic. It analyzed how the stressors related to COVID-19 and the use of social media promoted the psychological adjustment of individuals' coping strategies based on the transactional model of stress and coping. The authors collected survey data from 641 quarantined residents during the COVID-19 pandemic to analyze the relationships between perceived COVID-19 stress, social media use, and personal coping strategies. Research results revealed the critical role of social media use in coping with stress and psychological adjustment, which could help readers to understand how social media use affected the mental health of individuals under public health crises as well as the impact of different ways of social media use on individual psychological adjustment.

Article 3 ( Steinberger and Kim ) investigated unhealthy user behaviors represented by social network addiction and looked into the relationship between subjective wellbeing and social network addiction through a cross-sectional survey. In this article, the authors examined two possible mediating factors between subjective wellbeing and social network addiction: social comparison and the fear of missing out. Social comparison was divided into two aspects: social comparison of ability and social comparison of opinion. The former related to the social outcomes described in social network posts (such as material wealth, health status, and personal achievements), and the latter referred to the beliefs and values expressed in the posts. Results showed that social comparison and the fear of missing out jointly mediated the relationship between subjective wellbeing and social network addiction, and social comparison of ability played a more important role in social network addiction than social comparison of opinion. In addition, the fear of missing out in social networks also relies more on the process of ability than opinion comparisons. The findings of this study offered support for understanding social network addiction and promoting the formation of healthy behavior habits for social media users.

Article 4 ( Mensah et al. ) focused on government information transparency and information adoption by analyzing how perceived government information transparency affected the adoption of information related to COVID-19 on social media based on the information adoption model. In this article, the authors examined the survey data collected from 516 participants. It was found that information quality, credibility, and usefulness effectively affected the adoption of COVID-19 pandemic information on social media. Meanwhile, the perceived government information transparency positively moderated the impact of information quality, credibility, and usefulness on adopting COVID-19 pandemic information on social media. This study shed light on combating the wave of false information, improving social media's ability to respond to public health events, and establishing a sound public health emergency response system.

Article 5 ( Alon-Tirosh and Meir ) used a qualitative approach and examined how a group of adolescents with autism spectrum disorders and difficulties in communication used social network sites to communicate. In this article, based on semi-structured interviews with ten adolescents diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, the authors analyzed the reasons for using social networks, the specific situations of social network use, and the characteristics of autism reflected through social networking. The results provided insightful evidence about how social networks could play a role in the lives of adolescents with autism spectrum disorders, confirming that social media's social interaction function is even more essential for adolescents with autism.

Author contributions

MC: Project administration, Writing—original draft, Writing—review and editing. PL: Project administration, Writing—original draft, Writing—review and editing. CX: Project administration, Writing—original draft, Writing—review and editing. HL: Writing—original draft.

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This research was supported by grants from the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 22BSH109), the Shaanxi Province Innovation Capacity Support Program (Grant No. 2023-CX-RKX-005), the Chunhui Program of Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China (Grant No. 202200829), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. SK2022005), the Xi'an Science and Technology Program (Grant No. 23RKYJ0037), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 531118010405), and the Provincial Natural Science Foundation of Hunan (Grant No. 2021JJ40131).

Acknowledgments

We thank all authors' contributions to this Research Topic.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Brengarth, L. B., and Mujkic, E. (2016). WEB 2.0: How social media applications leverage nonprofit responses during a wildfire crisis. Comput. Hum. Behav. 54, 589–596. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2015.07.010

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Martínez-Rojas, M., Pardo-Ferreira, M., del, C., and Rubio-Romero, J. C. (2018). Twitter as a tool for the management and analysis of emergency situations: A systematic literature review. Int. J. Inf. Manage. 43, 196–208. doi: 10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2018.07.008

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Zhang, Y., Guo, B., Ding, Y., Liu, J., Qiu, C., Liu, S., et al. (2022). Investigation of the determinants for misinformation correction effectiveness on social media during COVID-19 pandemic. Inf. Proc. Manage. 59, 102935. doi: 10.1016/j.ipm.2022.102935

Keywords: network dissemination, social media, sentiment analysis, public crisis management, public mental health

Citation: Cai M, Liu P, Xu C and Luo H (2023) Editorial: Understanding the impact of social media on public mental health and crisis management during the COVID-19 pandemic. Front. Psychol. 14:1304586. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1304586

Received: 29 September 2023; Accepted: 04 October 2023; Published: 16 October 2023.

Edited and reviewed by: Rosanna E. Guadagno , University of Oulu, Finland

Copyright © 2023 Cai, Liu, Xu and Luo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Meng Cai, mengcai@mail.xjtu.edu.cn ; Pan Liu, liupan@hnu.edu.cn ; Chengwei Xu, xuchengwei1985@gmail.com

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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The Social Media and Mental Health Connection

Sherri Gordon, CLC is a published author, certified professional life coach, and bullying prevention expert. She's also the former editor of Columbus Parent and has countless years of experience writing and researching health and social issues.

Rachel Goldman, PhD FTOS, is a licensed psychologist, clinical assistant professor, speaker, wellness expert specializing in eating behaviors, stress management, and health behavior change.

Verywell / Catherine Song

Why Social Media Is Growing in Popularity

Social media and mental health concerns, signs social media is impacting your mental health.

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in social media use. According to the Pew Research Center, 72% of Americans in the U.S. use social media.

People use social networking tools to stay in touch with family and friends, get their news, and share their political views . This has some researchers wondering about the long-term effects of social media use.

Because social media use is still relatively new, there are no long-term studies documenting its effects. But several studies indicate that social media impacts mental health in a number of ways. The increasing reliance on and use of social media puts a large number of Americans at an increased risk for feeling anxious, depressed, lonely, envious, and even ill over social media use.

Aside from the fact that social media allows people to reconnect with family and friends that live far away or that they have lost touch with, it became a vital communication tool during the pandemic.

Social Media Supports Connections

People used social media to share information and connect with others when stay-at-home orders kept them from meeting in person. It became a vehicle for social support and connectedness that they would not otherwise have had.

Social Media Makes People Feel Good

Social media has a tendency to reinforce use. People quickly become hooked on checking their statuses for comments and likes, as well as perusing other people's posts.

Using social media sometimes activates the brain's reward center by releasing dopamine , also known as the feel-good chemical. This dopamine release, in turn, keeps people coming back because they want to repeat those feel-good experiences.

Social Media Boosts Self-Esteem

Social media also can boost self-esteem , especially if a person is viewed favorably online or gets a number of likes or interactions on their content. And social media allows some people to share parts of their identity that may be challenging to communicate in person.

Social media can be particularly helpful for people with social anxiety who struggle to interact with people in person.

Despite the above benefits, researchers are discovering that there are some downsides to social media, particularly with regard to mental health.

Social Media Use May Contribute to Depression

For a technology that's supposed to bring people closer together, it can have the opposite effect—especially when disagreements erupt online. Social media has been linked to depression , anxiety, and loneliness. It can make people feel isolated and alone.

One 2017 study found that young people who use social media more than two hours per day are much more likely to categorize their mental health as fair or poor compared to occasional social media users.

A large-scale study of young adults in the U.S. found that occasional users of social media are three times less likely to experience symptoms of depression than heavy users.

Social Media May Hurt Your Self-Esteem

While social media can sometimes be a self-esteem booster, it can also cause you to experience feelings of inadequacy about your life and your appearance. Even if you know that the images you see online are manipulated or represent someone else's highlight reel, they can still cause feelings of insecurity, envy, and dissatisfaction.

Fear of Missing Out

Another mental health phenomenon associated with social media is what is known as FOMO , or the "fear of missing out." Social media sites like Facebook and Instagram exacerbate the fear that you're missing something or that other people are living a better life than you are.

In extreme cases, FOMO can cause you to become tethered to your phone where you are constantly checking for updates or responding to every single alert.

Social Media Can Lead to Self-Absorption

Sharing endless selfies as well as your innermost thoughts on social media can create an unhealthy self-centeredness that causes you to focus on crafting your online image rather than making memories with your friends and family members in real life.

In fact, strenuous efforts to engage in impression management or get external validation can have psychological costs, especially if the approval you're seeking is never received. Ultimately, the lack of positive feedback online can lead to self-doubt and self-hatred .

Impulse Control Issues

Excessive social media use can lead to impulse control issues , especially if you access your social networks using a smartphone. This means that you have round-the-clock access to your accounts, which not only makes it easy for you always to be connected, but can affect your concentration and focus. It can even disturb your sleep and compromise your in-person relationships.

Social Media May Be Used As an Unhealthy Coping Mechanism

Social media can become an unhealthy way of coping with uncomfortable feelings or emotions . For instance, if you turn to social media when you're feeling down, lonely, or bored, you're potentially using it as a way to distract you from unpleasant feelings.

Ultimately, social media is a poor way to self-soothe, especially because perusing social media can often make you feel worse instead of better.

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Because everyone is different, there is no set amount of time spent on social media that is recommended. Instead, you need to evaluate how your social media use is impacting your life, including how you feel when you don't use social media as well as how you feel after using it.

A 2018 University of Pennsylvania study suggests that self-monitoring can change one's perception of social media. According to the lead researcher, psychologist Melissa G. Hunt, PhD, using social media less than you normally do, can lead to significant decreases in loneliness and depression. By using self-monitoring and making adjustments, people can significantly improve their overall well-being.

Social Media Distracts You

If you find that your social media use is impacting your relationships or is distracting you from work or school, it may be problematic. Additionally, if scrolling through social media leaves you feeling envious, depressed, anxious, or angry, then you need to re-evaluate your use.

It could be that you need to detox from social media and spend some time offline in order to safeguard your mental health.

You Use Social Media to Avoid Negative Emotions

Social media also could be an issue if you tend to use it to fight boredom or to deal with loneliness. Although these feelings are uncomfortable and it's only natural to want to alleviate them, turning to social media for comfort or as a distraction is not a healthy way to cope with difficult feelings and emotions.

As a result, it may be time for you to reassess your social media habits. Here are some additional signs that social media may be having a negative impact on your life and your mental health:

• Your symptoms of anxiety, depression, and loneliness are increasing.
• You are spending more time on social media than with your real-world friends and family members.
• You tend to compare yourself unfavorably with others on social media or you find that are your frequently jealous of others.
• You are being trolled or cyberbullied by others online.
• You are engaging in risky behaviors or taking outrageous photos in order to gain likes.
• Your work obligations, family life, or school work is suffering because of the time you spend on social media.
• You have little time for self-care activities like mindfulness , self-reflection, exercise, and sleep.

If you're spending a significant amount of time on social media and you're beginning to notice feelings of sadness, dissatisfaction, frustration, and loneliness that are impacting your life and your relationships, it may be time to re-evaluate your online habits.

If you find that even after adjusting your social media use, you're still experiencing symptoms of depression or anxiety, it's important to talk with your healthcare provider so that you can be evaluated. With proper treatment, you will soon be feeling better.

If you or a loved one are struggling with [condition name], contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357 for information on support and treatment facilities in your area.

For more mental health resources, see our National Helpline Database .

Pew Research Center. Social media fact sheet .

Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Social media use and mental health among students in Ontario . CAMH Population Studies eBulletin . 2018;19(2).

Lin LY, Sidani JE, Shensa A, et al. Association between social media use and depression among U.S. young adults . Depress Anxiety . 2016;33(4):323-31. doi:10.1002/da.22466.

Chou H-TG, Edge N. “They are happier and having better lives than i am”: The impact of using Facebook on perceptions of others’ lives .  Cyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw . 2012;15(2):117-121. doi:10.1089/cyber.2011.0324

Hunt MG, Marx R, Lipson C, Young J. No more FOMO: limiting social media decreases loneliness and depression . J Soc Clin Psychol . 2018;37(10):751-768. doi:10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751

Karim F, Oyewande AA, Abdalla LF, Chaudhry Ehsanullah R, Khan S. Social media use and its connection to mental health: a systematic review .  Cureus . 2020;12(6):e8627. doi:10.7759/cureus.8627

Pantic I. Online social networking and mental health .  Cyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw . 2014;17(10):652-657. doi:10.1089/cyber.2014.0070

By Sherri Gordon Sherri Gordon, CLC is a published author, certified professional life coach, and bullying prevention expert. She's also the former editor of Columbus Parent and has countless years of experience writing and researching health and social issues.

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What to know about social media and mental health

Social media use can lead to low quality sleep and harm mental health. It has associations with depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem.

Many people in today’s world live with their smartphones as virtual companions. These devices use electronic social media networks that alert users to updates on friends, favorite celebrities, and global events. Social media has become firmly integrated into a lot of people’s daily lives. According to the Pew Research Center, 72% of people in the United States now use social media.

At its core, social media is a powerful communication tool that has changed how individuals interact with one another. It speeds up how people exchange and share information, thoughts, and ideas across virtual networks. However, social media does have downsides. Some evidence suggests that its use — in particular, its overuse — can negatively affect mental health in numerous ways.

Keep reading to learn more about the links between social media and mental health, including the positive and negative effects that this tool can have on individuals.

Why social media affects mental health

Social media has associations with depression , anxiety, and feelings of isolation, particularly among heavy users.

A 2015 Common Sense survey found that teenagers may spend as much as 9 hours of each day online. Many of these individuals are themselves concerned that they spend too much time browsing social networks. This wave of concern suggests that social media could affect the mental health of its users.

The researchers behind a 2017 Canadian study confirmed this finding. They noted that students who use social media for more than 2 hours daily are considerably more likely to rate their mental health as fair or poor than occasional users.

A 2019 study tied social media use to disrupted and delayed sleep. Regular, high quality sleep is essential for well-being, and evidence shows that sleeping problems contribute to adverse mental health effects, such as depression and memory loss.

Aside from the adverse effects on sleep, social media may trigger mental health struggles by exposing individuals to cyberbullying. In a 2020 survey of more than 6,000 individuals aged 10–18 years, researchers found that about half of them had experienced cyberbullying.

One of the downsides of social media platforms is that they give individuals the opportunity to start or spread harmful rumors and use abusive words that can leave people with lasting emotional scars.

Social media has come under a lot of criticism, with many reports connecting its use with severe consequences.

National surveys and population-based studies show that the world of social media can have devastating effects on users’ mental health. In the U.S. alone, survey findings show a 25% increase in suicide attempts among teenagers between 2009 and 2017.

Although social media may not play a role in each of these incidences, the time frame correlates with the growing use of these platforms. A 2021 study confirms this effect. The researchers reported that while social media use had a minimal impact on boys’ risk of suicide , girls who used social media for at least 2 hours each day from the age of 13 years had a higher clinical risk of suicide as adults.

Furthermore, findings from a population-based study show a decline in mental health in the U.S., with a 37% increase in the likelihood of major depressive episodes among adolescents.

A 2019 study suggested that teenagers who use social media for more than 3 hours daily are more likely to experience mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety, aggression, and antisocial behavior.

Suicide prevention

If you know someone at immediate risk of self-harm, suicide, or hurting another person:

• Ask the tough question: “Are you considering suicide?”
• Listen to the person without judgment.
• Call 911 or the local emergency number, or text TALK to 741741 to communicate with a trained crisis counselor.
• Stay with the person until professional help arrives.
• Try to remove any weapons, medications, or other potentially harmful objects.

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, a prevention hotline can help. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours a day at 988. During a crisis, people who are hard of hearing can use their preferred relay service or dial 711 then 988.

Find more links and local resources.

Negative effects on health

Social media may trigger feelings of inadequacy. People may feel as though their life or appearance does not compare favorably with that of others on social media, leading to feelings of envy and dissatisfaction.

A 2018 study found that high social media usage increases rather than decreases feelings of loneliness. It also reported that reducing social media use helps people feel less lonely and isolated and improves their well-being.

Additionally, social media can facilitate cyberbullying and create unhealthy self-centeredness and distance from friends and family.

Positive effects

Despite its drawbacks, social media remains an efficient means of connecting communities and individuals across the world.

Social media-based networking among small groups of people is beneficial for many. Through social media, youngsters who struggle with social skills and anxiety can express themselves and socialize. It can be particularly advantageous for marginalized groups, such as LGBTQIA+ communities, as it enables people to meet and interact with other like-minded individuals.

Social media also serves as a platform that gives a voice to the voiceless. For example, people who have been subject to violence and abuse can use communities such as the #MeToo community to air their views, talk about what they are facing, and find support.

Social media can also educate and inform and provide an outlet for creativity and self-expression.

Linked conditions

Unregulated social media leads to a constant fear of missing out, which many refer to as FOMO. People may feel as though others are having more fun than them, which can affect self-esteem and cause mental health issues.

Individuals may compulsively check their phones at the cost of missing sleep or choose social media over in-person relationships or meetups.

Additionally, prioritizing social media networking over physical and social interactions increases the chances of mood disorders such as anxiety and depression.

Managing the effects

An individual can make their use of social media positive by:

• turning off a smartphone’s data connectivity at certain times of the day, such as while driving, at work, or in meetings
• turning off data connectivity while spending time with friends and family
• leaving the smartphone out of reach while sleeping
• turning off notifications to make it easier to resist the distracting beeps or vibrations
• limiting social media use to a computer rather than a smartphone

Preventing negative effects

People can help themselves avoid some of the adverse effects of social media by limiting use to 30 minutes a day , in turn reducing FOMO and the associated negative consequences.

By being more conscious of the amount of time they spend on social media, a person may notice improvements in their general mood, focus, and overall mental health.

Social media provides users with a rapid means of electronic communication and content sharing.

Although it has various positive effects, it can negatively affect users’ mental health.

Limiting the use of social media to 30 minutes a day can reduce FOMO and, in turn, relieve the loneliness, anxiety, depression, and sleep problems associated with excessive social media use.

Last medically reviewed on September 15, 2021

• Anxiety / Stress
• Psychology / Psychiatry

How we reviewed this article:

• Coyne, S. M., et al. (2021). Suicide risk in emerging adulthood: Associations with screen time over 10 years. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10964-020-01389-6
• Hunt, M. G., et al. (2018). No more FOMO: Limiting social media decreases loneliness and depression [Abstract]. https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751
• Jiang, J. (2018). How teens and parents navigate screen time and device distractions. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/08/22/how-teens-and-parents-navigate-screen-time-and-device-distractions/
• Lobe, B., et al. (2020). How children (10–18) experienced online risks during the COVID-19 lockdown — Spring 2020. https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC124034
• Mojtabai, R., et al. (2016). National trends in the prevalence and treatment of depression in adolescents and young adults. https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/138/6/e20161878.short
• Pane, N. E. (2018). The rate of high school-aged youth considering and committing suicide continues to rise, particularly among female students. https://www.childtrends.org/high-school-aged-youth-considering-and-committing-suicide-among-female-students
• Riehm, K. E., et al. (2019). Associations between time spent using social media and internalizing and externalizing problems among US youth. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2749480
• Scott, H., et al. (2019). Social media use and adolescent sleep patterns: Cross-sectional findings from the UK millennium cohort study. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6830469/
• Sleep disorders. (n.d.). https://www.nami.org/About-Mental-Illness/Common-with-Mental-Illness/Sleep-Disorders
• Social media fact sheet. (2021). https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/
• Social media use and mental health among students in Ontario. (2018). https://www.camh.ca/-/media/files/pdfs---ebulletin/ebulletin-19-n2-socialmedia-mentalhealth-2017osduhs-pdf.pdf
• The common sense census: Media use by tweens and teens. (2015). https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/uploads/research/census_researchreport.pdf

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Social media use can be positive for mental health and well-being

January 6, 2020— Mesfin Awoke Bekalu , research scientist in the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, discusses a new study he co-authored on associations between social media use and mental health and well-being.

What is healthy vs. potentially problematic social media use?

Our study has brought preliminary evidence to answer this question. Using a nationally representative sample, we assessed the association of two dimensions of social media use—how much it’s routinely used and how emotionally connected users are to the platforms—with three health-related outcomes: social well-being, positive mental health, and self-rated health.

We found that routine social media use—for example, using social media as part of everyday routine and responding to content that others share—is positively associated with all three health outcomes. Emotional connection to social media—for example, checking apps excessively out of fear of missing out, being disappointed about or feeling disconnected from friends when not logged into social media—is negatively associated with all three outcomes.

In more general terms, these findings suggest that as long as we are mindful users, routine use may not in itself be a problem. Indeed, it could be beneficial.

For those with unhealthy social media use, behavioral interventions may help. For example, programs that develop “effortful control” skills—the ability to self-regulate behavior—have been widely shown to be useful in dealing with problematic Internet and social media use.

We’re used to hearing that social media use is harmful to mental health and well-being, particularly for young people. Did it surprise you to find that it can have positive effects?

The findings go against what some might expect, which is intriguing. We know that having a strong social network is associated with positive mental health and well-being. Routine social media use may compensate for diminishing face-to-face social interactions in people’s busy lives. Social media may provide individuals with a platform that overcomes barriers of distance and time, allowing them to connect and reconnect with others and thereby expand and strengthen their in-person networks and interactions. Indeed, there is some empirical evidence supporting this.

On the other hand, a growing body of research has demonstrated that social media use is negatively associated with mental health and well-being, particularly among young people—for example, it may contribute to increased risk of depression and anxiety symptoms.

Our findings suggest that the ways that people are using social media may have more of an impact on their mental health and well-being than just the frequency and duration of their use.

What disparities did you find in the ways that social media use benefits and harms certain populations? What concerns does this raise?

My co-authors Rachel McCloud , Vish Viswanath , and I found that the benefits and harms associated with social media use varied across demographic, socioeconomic, and racial population sub-groups. Specifically, while the benefits were generally associated with younger age, better education, and being white, the harms were associated with older age, less education, and being a racial minority. Indeed, these findings are consistent with the body of work on communication inequalities and health disparities that our lab, the Viswanath lab , has documented over the past 15 or so years. We know that education, income, race, and ethnicity influence people’s access to, and ability to act on, health information from media, including the Internet. The concern is that social media may perpetuate those differences.

— Amy Roeder

Social Media and Mental Health Essay

The role of social media in people’s lives has increased exponentially over the past decade. The online personas that people create matter to them nearly just as much as their real-life image due to the constant communication and the opportunity to track down their responses to specific posts at any time. As a result, the impact of social media on the mental well-being of its users is worth considering. Sumner et al. point to the positive effects of social media, clarifying that the specified technological innovation can be used as the tool for improving mental health of its users. Namely, the research states that social media allows spreading useful and positive information about health-related issues much faster than traditional media. As a result, the opportunities for increasing the levels of public health and addressing some of the most common public health issues emerge.

The connection between the positivity of a message and its reception in social media is a crucial piece of information that needs to be incorporated into the current approach toward increasing the levels of public health, citizens’ health literacy, and the accessibility of health services. Namely, the conclusions that Sumner et al. make concerning the direct correlation between the positivity of a message and the likelihood of it being transmitted to a greater number of people should be used as the tool fro encouraging better health management: “Sheer volume of supportive content provided by produced by organizations or individuals may be less important than creating higher-quality messages” (p. 143). Thus, the conclusion that the authors provide should be used to enhance the efficacy and accessibility of the current health services.

One could argue that the general research outcomes should be seen as quite upsetting given the implications that they provide. Namely, the fact that the work of health professionals, who perform meticulous studies and arrange the data as carefully as possible to provide accurate and concise guidelines may be less important than an upbeat yet empty message is a rather sad idea. The specified conclusions may lead to a drop in the extent of health practitioners’ and nurse educators’ enthusiasm in providing the services of the highest quality.

However, the message that Sumner et al. convey could also be seen as an opportunity for enhancing health education and raising health literacy within the community by building a better rapport with its members. Namely, the data about the significance of the use of positivity in social networks as the tool for attracting the attention of patients and target audiences should be utilized to shape the current approach toward promoting health literacy. Specifically, healthcare practitioners and registered nurses, especially those that address the issues of patient education directly, need to create the strategy for the online conversation with patients through social media. The specified dialogue could be based on a combination of positive messages and clear visuals that inform patients about key issues in health management and provide them with an opportunity to improve their health literacy.

Additionally, the authors have provided an important tool for the development of a campaign aimed at public health management and improvement. Namely, based on the outcomes of the research carried out by Sumner et al. have informed the strategies for improving communication between patients and nurse educators. The specified change in how people perceive health management is especially important in the context of the present-day epidemic of coronavirus. Given the rapid spread of the epidemic and its recent transformation into the pandemic, reinforcing the instructions for people to remain safe is an essential task for APRNs and healthcare experts worldwide. In turn, the application of social media suits perfectly for the described purpose since it allows sharing information instantly and providing people with clear and concise guidelines for them to follow. Although social media mostly do not allow for detailed descriptions of specific health concerns and profound analysis of these issues, they serve their purpose of bulletin boards with clear and distinct guidelines that the members of the global community can apply to their daily routine.

Specifically, the use of positive messages in social media will reinforce the importance of guidelines and ensuring that people will follow them properly. For instance, Sumner et al. mention that the use of social networks has helped to promote social sharing. As the authors explain, “In topic areas such as cancer support, investigators found that the degree of positive sentiment in a message is associated with increased message spread” (Summer et al, p. 143). Therefore, the inclusion of positive thinking and positive emotions into the process of knowledge sharing enhances the extent to which people are willing to engage in the discussion. Moreover, the rise in the inclination to share a message that is positive will allow fighting some of the most severe health concerns that the global community is facing presently, primarily, the coronavirus.

Furthermore, the discussion sparked by the authors raises the question of inaccurate health-related information in social media and the means of filtering data. Indeed, for an uninitiated user of social media, discerning between accurate health-related information and the posts that reinforce health-associated myths is virtually impossible. Although some indicators such as the identity of the user posting the information could provide hints regarding the veracity of data, social media users have to rely on their intuition for the most part. Therefore, it is also critical for nurses to develop strategies for shielding social media users from the data that provides a distorted picture of health management.

Finally, the issue of addressing serious health concerns in social media should be discussed as a contentious subject. Given the outcomes of the research performed by Summer et al., it is critical to focus on delivering positive messages to target audiences to increase compliance with the established health management strategies. However, when tackling a serious health concern that has led or may potentially lead to a rapid rise in lethal outcomes, remaining positive becomes quite challenging. Not only will a message sound false in the specified circumstances, but it is also likely to be perceived in a negative light due to the dissonance between the subject matter and the tone of its delivery. Therefore, the outcomes of the study pose a difficult dilemma for educators and healthcare providers to resolve when addressing their target audiences via social media. Namely, retaining positivity while talking about serious issues is likely to become a major stumbling block for most healthcare service members.

The outcomes of the study performed by Summer et al. have offered a range of important insights, the significance of positivity in modern media as the means of encouraging citizens to accept healthy behaviors being one of the key conclusions. However, to apply the specified results to the management of current public health concerns, one will have to shape the existing framework for communicating with patients significantly. Therefore, the research should be seen as the basis for redesigning the present health education strategy, as well as the approach toward conversing with patients.

Sumner, Steven A., et al. “Factors Associated with Increased Dissemination of Positive Mental Health Messaging on Social Media.” Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention , vol. 41, no. 2, 2019, pp. 141-145. doi:10.1027/0227-5910/a000598.

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IvyPanda. (2022, February 17). Social Media and Mental Health. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-and-mental-health/

"Social Media and Mental Health." IvyPanda , 17 Feb. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-and-mental-health/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Social Media and Mental Health'. 17 February.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Social Media and Mental Health." February 17, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-and-mental-health/.

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Social Media

Can social media cause mental health conditions, what is the real relationship between using social media and poor mental health.

Posted March 28, 2024 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• Understanding any link requires an understanding of what diagnosis of a mental health condition involves.
• Talk of causation can be misleading as to the nature of the needed exploration.
• It may be better to examine the relationships between the social media use behavior and behaviors that emerge.

Legitimate questions have been asked for a long period concerning whether social media use causes particular mental health conditions. Mental health conditions such as depression , anxiety , autism spectrum disorder, attention -deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder have been linked with overuse of social media. If the development of such conditions is demonstrated to be correlated with the usage of social media, then whether a causal relationship exists appears to be an important and sensible question. However, understanding any link between social media use and mental health conditions is far from straightforward and requires a subtle understanding of what the diagnosis of a mental health condition involves.

4 Possible Reasons

There are several plausible answers to the question of what underlies the correlations often seen in the literature. Firstly, it could be that social media use leads to the development of mental health conditions. This answer implies a causal relationship and suggests that something about social media use is damaging to mental health. Secondly, it could be that mental health conditions lead to social media use. This answer suggests that the presence of mental health conditions somehow makes a person use social media more often, perhaps as a coping mechanism or management strategy. Thirdly, it may be that some third variable leads to the development of mental health conditions and overuse of social media; for instance, an attachment problem may provoke mental health issues as well as using social media to gain attachment that cannot otherwise be found. Finally, it could be argued that social media use produces behaviours similar to those seen in mental health conditions but that are not really the same as a mental health condition. For example, heavy selfie-posting on social media may lead to behaviours similar to those seen with narcissism, but that are not really narcissism.

All these solutions to why a correlation exists between social media overuse and mental health problems are legitimate, in the sense that all have been posited and all fall within the realm of sensible scientific discourse. However, there is an issue that all such attempts to address this relationship must grapple with, which concerns the nature of a mental health problem. All the above solutions, although different in their particulars, share one thing in common—namely, they all assume that there is such a thing as a mental health condition that can be caused. They all assume some kind of relatively straightforward "billiard ball" model of cause and effect—that is, one thing (e.g., social media use) impacts upon another (e.g., mental health) and sets the second thing in motion.

It may be that this sort of causal model does not capture the relationship between a particular behaviour (overuse of social media) and a set of subsequently co-occurring behaviours (the mental health condition). The first can be regarded as a single sort of thing—the use of a digital device—and this sort of thing could easily be fitted into a billiard-ball model of causation. However, the latter (the mental health condition) is not a thing in the sense that there is an "it," but rather, this is a concept, and it is far from clear that a concept is a type of thing that can be caused in a billiard ball sort of way.

There are many everyday conceptions of what a mental health condition is; often, people think of these conditions as illnesses, like a cold, that have signs and symptoms (e.g., coughs and sneezes) resulting from an underlying viral infection. In this conception, the cause-effect relationship is somewhat difficult to specify, as the virus does not cause the cold, but the virus is identical to the cold (and so cannot be its cause in any ordinary sense). The virus might possibly be said to be the cause of the signs and symptoms associated with the cold (although, this is tricky), or some event could be said to have caused the virus to act on the person. If this view of a mental health condition is to be followed, then any of the first three explanations as to the social-media-use and poor-mental-health relationship, noted above, must be examined carefully for their precise view of what is being caused by what.

However, in mental health, there is an aspect of the above cold-virus-symptoms relationship that is missing: There is no thing (like a virus) that underlies the signs and symptoms of a mental health condition. A mental health condition is defined, in all recognised diagnostic manuals, only as a cluster of signs and symptoms that, when occurring together in the appropriate numbers, are termed a "mental health condition." For example, for depression, there must exist together a minimum of five out of a possible nine behaviours; there is no depression independent of these behaviours. In this sense, social media use does not cause a mental health condition like a virus causes the signs and symptoms in a physical illness. The mental health condition does not exist beyond the signs and symptoms; it is identical with those signs and symptoms—note the contrast between the nature of the identity present in physical and mental health—and so cannot be their cause.

Looking for the Relationship Rather Than Causation

It may be more proper to look for the relationship between social media use and particular behaviours, rather than a mental health condition, per se. Once this view is taken, then the fourth view, outlined above—that social media use is related to particular behaviours that look like, but are not, particular mental health conditions—cannot be correct. If the behaviours are those that tick the boxes for a mental health condition, and they occur together in the appropriate numbers, then it is that mental health condition.

The upshot of any such analysis is that talk of causation between social media use and mental health conditions can be confusing and can be misleading as to the nature of the exploration that needs to be undertaken. It may be much more profitable to examine the functional relationships between the behaviour of social media use and the behaviours that subsequently emerge. To start searching for things that do not exist outside those behaviours can produce much wasted time and effort. It can also allow a degree of misdirection in terms of the harms that can be done by social media, by obscuring the important relationships involved.

Phil Reed, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at Swansea University.

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End the Phone-Based Childhood Now

The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

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S omething went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics : Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.

The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand , the Nordic countries , and beyond . By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

The decline in mental health is just one of many signs that something went awry. Loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. Academic achievement went down, too. According to “The Nation’s Report Card,” scores in reading and math began to decline for U.S. students after 2012, reversing decades of slow but generally steady increase. PISA, the major international measure of educational trends, shows that declines in math, reading, and science happened globally, also beginning in the early 2010s.

Read: It sure looks like phones are making students dumber

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less , having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likely to live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens , and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May , OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

Generations are not monolithic, of course. Many young people are flourishing. Taken as a whole, however, Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. And if a generation is doing poorly––if it is more anxious and depressed and is starting families, careers, and important companies at a substantially lower rate than previous generations––then the sociological and economic consequences will be profound for the entire society.

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound , but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction . Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.

Jonathan Haidt: Get phones out of schools now

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As a social psychologist who has long studied social and moral development, I have been involved in debates about the effects of digital technology for years. Typically, the scientific questions have been framed somewhat narrowly, to make them easier to address with data. For example, do adolescents who consume more social media have higher levels of depression? Does using a smartphone just before bedtime interfere with sleep? The answer to these questions is usually found to be yes, although the size of the relationship is often statistically small, which has led some researchers to conclude that these new technologies are not responsible for the gigantic increases in mental illness that began in the early 2010s.

But before we can evaluate the evidence on any one potential avenue of harm, we need to step back and ask a broader question: What is childhood––including adolescence––and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it? If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

Brain development is sometimes said to be “experience-expectant,” because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life when an animal’s brain can “expect” to have certain kinds of experiences. You can see this with baby geese, who will imprint on whatever mother-sized object moves in their vicinity just after they hatch. You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it’s hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker. There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel “American” in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn’t arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn’t come to feel American.

Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults. Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills. Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions—flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play .

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults .

From the April 2014 issue: The overprotected kid

Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities––play, exploration, and intense socializing––were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.

And then we changed childhood.

The changes started slowly in the late 1970s and ’80s, before the arrival of the internet, as many parents in the U.S. grew fearful that their children would be harmed or abducted if left unsupervised. Such crimes have always been extremely rare, but they loomed larger in parents’ minds thanks in part to rising levels of street crime combined with the arrival of cable TV, which enabled round-the-clock coverage of missing-children cases. A general decline in social capital ––the degree to which people knew and trusted their neighbors and institutions–– exacerbated parental fears . Meanwhile, rising competition for college admissions encouraged more intensive forms of parenting . In the 1990s, American parents began pulling their children indoors or insisting that afternoons be spent in adult-run enrichment activities. Free play, independent exploration, and teen-hangout time declined.

In recent decades, seeing unchaperoned children outdoors has become so novel that when one is spotted in the wild, some adults feel it is their duty to call the police. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that parents, on average, believed that children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in front of their house, and that kids should be 14 before being allowed to go unsupervised to a public park. Most of these same parents had enjoyed joyous and unsupervised outdoor play by the age of 7 or 8.

But overprotection is only part of the story. The transition away from a more independent childhood was facilitated by steady improvements in digital technology, which made it easier and more inviting for young people to spend a lot more time at home, indoors, and alone in their rooms. Eventually, tech companies got access to children 24/7. They developed exciting virtual activities, engineered for “engagement,” that are nothing like the real-world experiences young brains evolved to expect.

The first wave came ashore in the 1990s with the arrival of dial-up internet access, which made personal computers good for something beyond word processing and basic games. By 2003, 55 percent of American households had a computer with (slow) internet access. Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and other measures of poor mental health did not rise in this first wave. If anything, they went down a bit. Millennial teens (born 1981 through 1995), who were the first to go through puberty with access to the internet, were psychologically healthier and happier, on average, than their older siblings or parents in Generation X (born 1965 through 1980).

The second wave began to rise in the 2000s, though its full force didn’t hit until the early 2010s. It began rather innocently with the introduction of social-media platforms that helped people connect with their friends. Posting and sharing content became much easier with sites such as Friendster (launched in 2003), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

Teens embraced social media soon after it came out, but the time they could spend on these sites was limited in those early years because the sites could only be accessed from a computer, often the family computer in the living room. Young people couldn’t access social media (and the rest of the internet) from the school bus, during class time, or while hanging out with friends outdoors. Many teens in the early-to-mid-2000s had cellphones, but these were basic phones (many of them flip phones) that had no internet access. Typing on them was difficult––they had only number keys. Basic phones were tools that helped Millennials meet up with one another in person or talk with each other one-on-one. I have seen no evidence to suggest that basic cellphones harmed the mental health of Millennials.

It was not until the introduction of the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and high-speed internet (which reached 50 percent of American homes in 2007 )—and the corresponding pivot to mobile made by many providers of social media, video games, and porn—that it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online. The extraordinary synergy among these innovations was what powered the second technological wave. In 2011, only 23 percent of teens had a smartphone. By 2015, that number had risen to 73 percent , and a quarter of teens said they were online “almost constantly.” Their younger siblings in elementary school didn’t usually have their own smartphones, but after its release in 2010, the iPad quickly became a staple of young children’s daily lives. It was in this brief period, from 2010 to 2015, that childhood in America (and many other countries) was rewired into a form that was more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.

In the 2000s, Silicon Valley and its world-changing inventions were a source of pride and excitement in America. Smart and ambitious young people around the world wanted to move to the West Coast to be part of the digital revolution. Tech-company founders such as Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin were lauded as gods, or at least as modern Prometheans, bringing humans godlike powers. The Arab Spring bloomed in 2011 with the help of decentralized social platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. When pundits and entrepreneurs talked about the power of social media to transform society, it didn’t sound like a dark prophecy.

You have to put yourself back in this heady time to understand why adults acquiesced so readily to the rapid transformation of childhood. Many parents had concerns , even then, about what their children were doing online, especially because of the internet’s ability to put children in contact with strangers. But there was also a lot of excitement about the upsides of this new digital world. If computers and the internet were the vanguards of progress, and if young people––widely referred to as “digital natives”––were going to live their lives entwined with these technologies, then why not give them a head start? I remember how exciting it was to see my 2-year-old son master the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone in 2008. I thought I could see his neurons being woven together faster as a result of the stimulation it brought to his brain, compared to the passivity of watching television or the slowness of building a block tower. I thought I could see his future job prospects improving.

Touchscreen devices were also a godsend for harried parents. Many of us discovered that we could have peace at a restaurant, on a long car trip, or at home while making dinner or replying to emails if we just gave our children what they most wanted: our smartphones and tablets. We saw that everyone else was doing it and figured it must be okay.

It was the same for older children, desperate to join their friends on social-media platforms, where the minimum age to open an account was set by law to 13, even though no research had been done to establish the safety of these products for minors. Because the platforms did nothing (and still do nothing) to verify the stated age of new-account applicants, any 10-year-old could open multiple accounts without parental permission or knowledge, and many did. Facebook and later Instagram became places where many sixth and seventh graders were hanging out and socializing. If parents did find out about these accounts, it was too late. Nobody wanted their child to be isolated and alone, so parents rarely forced their children to shut down their accounts.

We had no idea what we were doing.

The numbers are hard to believe. The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and YouTube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average . The numbers are even higher in single-parent and low-income families, and among Black, Hispanic, and Native American families.

These very high numbers do not include time spent in front of screens for school or homework, nor do they include all the time adolescents spend paying only partial attention to events in the real world while thinking about what they’re missing on social media or waiting for their phones to ping. Pew reports that in 2022, one-third of teens said they were on one of the major social-media sites “almost constantly,” and nearly half said the same of the internet in general. For these heavy users, nearly every waking hour is an hour absorbed, in full or in part, by their devices.

In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it. Everything else in an adolescent’s day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed, and for the hundreds of “friends,” “followers,” and other network connections that must be serviced with texts, posts, comments, likes, snaps, and direct messages. I recently surveyed my students at NYU, and most of them reported that the very first thing they do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their texts, direct messages, and social-media feeds. It’s also the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night. And it’s a lot of what they do in between.

The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping declined in the early 2010s , and many studies tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they’re used to scroll through social media . Exercise declined , too, which is unfortunate because exercise, like sleep, improves both mental and physical health. Book reading has been declining for decades, pushed aside by digital alternatives, but the decline, like so much else, sped up in the early 2010 s. With passive entertainment always available, adolescent minds likely wander less than they used to; contemplation and imagination might be placed on the list of things winnowed down or crowded out.

But perhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.

Read: What happens when kids don’t see their peers for months

You might question the importance of this decline. After all, isn’t much of this online time spent interacting with friends through texting, social media, and multiplayer video games? Isn’t that just as good?

Some of it surely is, and virtual interactions offer unique benefits too, especially for young people who are geographically or socially isolated. But in general, the virtual world lacks many of the features that make human interactions in the real world nutritious, as we might say, for physical, social, and emotional development. In particular, real-world relationships and social interactions are characterized by four features—typical for hundreds of thousands of years—that online interactions either distort or erase.

First, real-world interactions are embodied , meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone. No matter how many emojis are offered as compensation, the elimination of communication channels for which we have eons of evolutionary programming is likely to produce adults who are less comfortable and less skilled at interacting in person.

Second, real-world interactions are synchronous ; they happen at the same time. As a result, we learn subtle cues about timing and conversational turn taking. Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that’s what getting “in sync” does. Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.

Third, real-world interactions primarily involve one‐to‐one communication , or sometimes one-to-several. But many virtual communications are broadcast to a potentially huge audience. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them. The sender’s motivations are different, too: With a large audience, one’s reputation is always on the line; an error or poor performance can damage social standing with large numbers of peers. These communications thus tend to be more performative and anxiety-inducing than one-to-one conversations.

Finally, real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit , so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. But in many virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit when they are displeased. Relationships within such networks are usually more disposable.

From the September 2015 issue: The coddling of the American mind

These unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their “experience expectant” brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.

Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness. The brain contains systems that are specialized for approach (when opportunities beckon) and withdrawal (when threats appear or seem likely). People can be in what we might call “discover mode” or “defend mode” at any moment, but generally not both. The two systems together form a mechanism for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat that can activate either a heating system or a cooling system as the temperature fluctuates. Some people’s internal thermostats are generally set to discover mode, and they flip into defend mode only when clear threats arise. These people tend to see the world as full of opportunities. They are happier and less anxious. Other people’s internal thermostats are generally set to defend mode, and they flip into discover mode only when they feel unusually safe. They tend to see the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

Staying on task while sitting at a computer is hard enough for an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex. It is far more difficult for adolescents in front of their laptop trying to do homework. They are probably less intrinsically motivated to stay on task. They’re certainly less able, given their undeveloped prefrontal cortex, and hence it’s easy for any company with an app to lure them away with an offer of social validation or entertainment. Their phones are pinging constantly— one study found that the typical adolescent now gets 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for doing almost anything big, creative, or valuable, yet young people find their attention chopped up into little bits by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.

It even happens in the classroom. Studies confirm that when students have access to their phones during class time, they use them, especially for texting and checking social media, and their grades and learning suffer . This might explain why benchmark test scores began to decline in the U.S. and around the world in the early 2010s—well before the pandemic hit.

The neural basis of behavioral addiction to social media or video games is not exactly the same as chemical addiction to cocaine or opioids. Nonetheless, they all involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine; when the child is not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn’t have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms. These generally include anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability. Kids with these kinds of behavioral addictions often become surly and aggressive, and withdraw from their families into their bedrooms and devices.

Social-media and gaming platforms were designed to hook users. How successful are they? How many kids suffer from digital addictions?

The main addiction risks for boys seem to be video games and porn. “ Internet gaming disorder ,” which was added to the main diagnosis manual of psychiatry in 2013 as a condition for further study, describes “significant impairment or distress” in several aspects of life, along with many hallmarks of addiction, including an inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so. Estimates for the prevalence of IGD range from 7 to 15 percent among adolescent boys and young men. As for porn, a nationally representative survey of American adults published in 2019 found that 7 percent of American men agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am addicted to pornography”—and the rates were higher for the youngest men.

Girls have much lower rates of addiction to video games and porn, but they use social media more intensely than boys do. A study of teens in 29 nations found that between 5 and 15 percent of adolescents engage in what is called “problematic social media use,” which includes symptoms such as preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, neglect of other areas of life, and lying to parents and friends about time spent on social media. That study did not break down results by gender, but many others have found that rates of “problematic use” are higher for girls.

Jonathan Haidt: The dangerous experiment on teen girls

I don’t want to overstate the risks: Most teens do not become addicted to their phones and video games. But across multiple studies and across genders, rates of problematic use come out in the ballpark of 5 to 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that something like one in 10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that disrupted various domains of life and looked a lot like an addiction?

During that crucial sensitive period for cultural learning, from roughly ages 9 through 15, we should be especially thoughtful about who is socializing our children for adulthood. Instead, that’s when most kids get their first smartphone and sign themselves up (with or without parental permission) to consume rivers of content from random strangers. Much of that content is produced by other adolescents, in blocks of a few minutes or a few seconds.

This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life. Adolescents spend less time steeped in their local or national culture. They are coming of age in a confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them. Without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad––a process that plays out over many generations––young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them, which might explain why v ideos showing young people reacting positively to Osama bin Laden’s thoughts about America were trending on TikTok last fall.

All this is made worse by the fact that so much of digital public life is an unending supply of micro dramas about somebody somewhere in our country of 340 million people who did something that can fuel an outrage cycle, only to be pushed aside by the next. It doesn’t add up to anything and leaves behind only a distorted sense of human nature and affairs.

When our public life becomes fragmented, ephemeral, and incomprehensible, it is a recipe for anomie, or normlessness. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim showed long ago that a society that fails to bind its people together with some shared sense of sacredness and common respect for rules and norms is not a society of great individual freedom; it is, rather, a place where disoriented individuals have difficulty setting goals and exerting themselves to achieve them. Durkheim argued that anomie was a major driver of suicide rates in European countries. Modern scholars continue to draw on his work to understand suicide rates today.

Durkheim’s observations are crucial for understanding what happened in the early 2010s. A long-running survey of American teens found that , from 1990 to 2010, high-school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as “Life often feels meaningless.” But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt “meaningless” increased by about 70 percent, to more than one in five.

An additional source of evidence comes from Gen Z itself. With all the talk of regulating social media, raising age limits, and getting phones out of schools, you might expect to find many members of Gen Z writing and speaking out in opposition. I’ve looked for such arguments and found hardly any. In contrast, many young adults tell stories of devastation.

Freya India, a 24-year-old British essayist who writes about girls, explains how social-media sites carry girls off to unhealthy places: “It seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it.” She continues:

Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment. We were the first to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn’t just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick.

Rikki Schlott, a 23-year-old American journalist and co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind , writes ,

The day-to-day life of a typical teen or tween today would be unrecognizable to someone who came of age before the smartphone arrived. Zoomers are spending an average of 9 hours daily in this screen-time doom loop—desperate to forget the gaping holes they’re bleeding out of, even if just for … 9 hours a day. Uncomfortable silence could be time to ponder why they’re so miserable in the first place. Drowning it out with algorithmic white noise is far easier.

A 27-year-old man who spent his adolescent years addicted (his word) to video games and pornography sent me this reflection on what that did to him:

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life—a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn’t spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

Or consider what Facebook found in a research project involving focus groups of young people, revealed in 2021 by the whistleblower Frances Haugen: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens,” an internal document said. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

How can it be that an entire generation is hooked on consumer products that so few praise and so many ultimately regret using? Because smartphones and especially social media have put members of Gen Z and their parents into a series of collective-action traps. Once you understand the dynamics of these traps, the escape routes become clear.

Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.

From the May 2022 issue: Jonathan Haidt on why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, “Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?” A majority of students said yes––58 percent for each app.

This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem . It’s what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is deterred from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Fishermen considering limiting their catch to avoid wiping out the local fish population are caught in this same kind of trap. If no one else does it too, they just lose profit.

Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all.

The trap here is that each child thinks they need a smartphone because “everyone else” has one, and many parents give in because they don’t want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone—or even if, say, only half of the child’s sixth-grade class had one—parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone (or no phone at all). Delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade (around age 14) as a national or community norm would help to protect adolescents during the very vulnerable first few years of puberty. According to a 2022 British study , these are the years when social-media use is most correlated with poor mental health. Family policies about tablets, laptops, and video-game consoles should be aligned with smartphone restrictions to prevent overuse of other screen activities.

The trap here, as with smartphones, is that each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that’s where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube—only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.

Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren’t supposed to take their phone out of their pocket during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes––times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students’ minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up .

Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes “good parenting.” And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility––for example, by asking their kids to do more to help out, or to care for others––then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.

It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.

The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else. Smartphones are experience blockers. Our ultimate goal should not be to remove screens entirely, nor should it be to return childhood to exactly the way it was in 1960. Rather, it should be to create a version of childhood and adolescence that keeps young people anchored in the real world while flourishing in the digital age.

In recent decades, however, Congress has not been good at addressing public concerns when the solutions would displease a powerful and deep-pocketed industry. Governors and state legislators have been much more effective, and their successes might let us evaluate how well various reforms work. But the bottom line is that to change norms, we’re going to need to do most of the work ourselves, in neighborhood groups, schools, and other communities.

Read: Why Congress keeps failing to protect kids online

There are now hundreds of organizations––most of them started by mothers who saw what smartphones had done to their children––that are working to roll back the phone-based childhood or promote a more independent, real-world childhood. (I have assembled a list of many of them.) One that I co-founded, at LetGrow.org , suggests a variety of simple programs for parents or schools, such as play club (schools keep the playground open at least one day a week before or after school, and kids sign up for phone-free, mixed-age, unstructured play as a regular weekly activity) and the Let Grow Experience (a series of homework assignments in which students––with their parents’ consent––choose something to do on their own that they’ve never done before, such as walk the dog, climb a tree, walk to a store, or cook dinner).

Even without the help of organizations, parents could break their families out of collective-action traps if they coordinated with the parents of their children’s friends. Together they could create common smartphone rules and organize unsupervised play sessions or encourage hangouts at a home, park, or shopping mall.

P arents are fed up with what childhood has become. Many are tired of having daily arguments about technologies that were designed to grab hold of their children’s attention and not let go. But the phone-based childhood is not inevitable.

We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.

This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness .

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In “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt says we’re failing children — and takes a firm stand against tech.

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Tracy A. Dennis-Tiwary is a professor of psychology and neuroscience, director of the Emotion Regulation Lab at Hunter College.

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THE ANXIOUS GENERATION: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness , by Jonathan Haidt

Imagine that your 10-year-old daughter gets chosen to join the first human settlement on Mars. She’s ready to blast off but needs your permission.

You learn that the billionaire architect of the mission hasn’t considered the risks posed by the red planet’s toxic environment, including kids developing “deformities in their skeletons, hearts, eyes and brains.”

Would you let her go?

It’s with this “Black Mirror”-esque morality play that Jonathan Haidt sets the tone for everything that follows in his erudite, engaging, combative, crusading new book, “The Anxious Generation.” Mars is a stand-in for the noxious world of social media. If we’d say no to that perilous planet, we should of course say no to this other alien universe.

Instead, we hem and haw about the risks, failing to keep our kids safely grounded in nondigital reality. The result can no longer be ignored: deformities of the brain and heart — anxiety, depression, suicidality — plaguing our youth.

Haidt, a social psychologist, is a man on a mission to correct this collective failure. His first step is to convince us that youth are experiencing a “tidal wave” of suffering. In a single chapter and with a dozen carefully curated graphs, he depicts increases in mental illness and distress beginning around 2012. Young adolescent girls are hit hardest, but boys are in pain, too, as are older teens.

The timing of this is key because it coincides with the rise of what he terms phone-based childhood. From the late 2000s to the early 2010s, smartphones, bristling with social media apps and fueled by high-speed internet, became ubiquitous. Their siren call, addictive by design and perpetually distracting, quickly spirited kids to worlds beyond our control.

It wasn’t phones alone. A second phenomenon coincided with the rise of the machines: the decline of play-based childhood. This change started in the 1980s, with kidnapping fears and stranger danger driving parents toward fear-based overparenting. This decimated children’s unsupervised, self-directed playtime and restricted their freedom of movement.

With parents and children alike stuck in “Defend mode,” kids were in turn blocked from discovery mode, where they face challenges, take risks and explore — the building blocks of anti-fragility, or the ability to grow stronger through adversity. Compared to a generation ago, our children are spending more time on their phones and less on, well, sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. While fewer hospital visits and teen pregnancies are obvious wins, less risk-taking overall could stunt independence.

That’s why parents, he argues, should become more like gardeners (to use Alison Gopnik’s formulation) who cultivate conditions for children to independently grow and flourish, and less like carpenters, who work obsessively to control, design and shape their offspring. We’ve overprotected our kids in the real world while underprotecting them in the virtual one, leaving them too much to their own devices, literally and figuratively.

It’s this one-two punch of smartphones plus overprotective parenting, Haidt posits, that led to the great rewiring of childhood and the associated harms driving mental illness: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation and addiction. He has a lot to say about each of these.

Here is where his ideas and interpretation of research become contentious. Few would disagree that unhealthy use of social media contributes to psychological problems, or that parenting plays a role. But mental illness is complex: a multidetermined synergy between risk and resilience. Clinical scientists don’t look for magic-bullet explanations. They seek to understand how, for whom and in what contexts psychological problems and resilience emerge.

Haidt does recognize that nuance complicates the issue. Online — but not in the book — he and colleagues report that adolescent girls from “wealthy, individualistic and secular nations” who are “less tightly bound into strong communities” are accounting for much of the crisis. So perhaps smartphones alone haven’t destroyed an entire generation. And maybe context matters. But this rarely comes through in the book.

The final sections offer advice for reducing harmful, predatory aspects of technology and helping parents, educators and communities become more gardener and less carpenter. Some tips will be familiar (ban phones from school; give kids more independence). Other advice might give readers pause (no smartphones before high school; no social media before 16). Yet, taken together, it’s a reasonable list.

Still, Haidt is a digital absolutist, skeptical that healthy relationships between youth and social media are possible. On this point, he even rebuffs the U.S. Surgeon General’s more measured position. We’re better off banning phones in schools altogether, he asserts. Because, as he quotes a middle school principal, schools without phone bans are like a “zombie apocalypse” with “all these kids in the hallways not talking to each other.”

Whether or not you agree with the zombie apocalypse diagnosis, it’s worth considering the failure of prior absolutist stances. Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No drug campaign? A public health case study in what not to do. During the AIDS crisis, fear mongering and abstinence demands didn’t prevent unsafe sex. Remember the pandemic? Telling Americans to wear masks at all times undermined public health officials’ ability to convince them to wear masks when it really mattered.

Digital absolutism also risks blinding us to other causes — and solutions. In 1960s Britain, annual suicide rates plummeted. Many believed the drop was due to improved antidepressant medications or life just getting better. They weren’t looking in the right place. The phaseout of coal-based gas for household stoves blocked the most common method of suicide: gas poisoning. Means restriction, because it gives the despairing one less opportunity for self-harm, has since become a key strategy for suicide prevention.

“I’ve been struggling to figure out,” Haidt writes, “what is happening to us? How is technology changing us?” His answer: “The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us.” In other words: Choose human purity and sanctity over the repugnant forces of technology. This dialectic is compelling, but the moral matrix of the problem — and the scientific foundations — are more complex.

Yes, digital absolutism might convince policymakers to change laws and increase regulation. It might be a wake-up call for some parents. But it also might backfire, plunging us into defense mode and blocking our path of discovery toward healthy and empowered digital citizenship.

THE ANXIOUS GENERATION : How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness | By Jonathan Haidt | Penguin Press | 385 pp. | $30

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The generation of people born between 1997 and 2012 is changing fashion, culture, politics, the workplace and more..

For many Gen-Zers without much disposable income, Facebook isn’t a place to socialize online — it’s where they can get deals on items  they wouldn’t normally be able to afford.

Dating apps are struggling to live up to investors’ expectations . Blame the members of Generation Z, who are often not willing to shell out for paid subscriptions.

Young people tend to lean more liberal on issues pertaining to relationship norms. But when it comes to dating, the idea that men should pay in heterosexual courtships  still prevails among Gen Z-ers .

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Essay on Effects Of Social Media On Mental Health

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100 Words Essay on Effects Of Social Media On Mental Health

Introduction.

Social media is a tool that lets us communicate and share with people around the world. It’s very popular, especially with young people. But, it can also affect our mental health in different ways.

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In conclusion, social media can have both positive and negative effects on our mental health. It’s important to use it wisely and remember that it’s okay to take a break if it’s making us feel bad.

250 Words Essay on Effects Of Social Media On Mental Health

Social media is a powerful tool that connects people from all corners of the world. It is a platform where we share our thoughts, ideas, and daily life activities. But, it also has a great impact on our mental health.

Impacts on Self-Esteem

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500 Words Essay on Effects Of Social Media On Mental Health

Social media is a big part of our lives. We use it to chat with friends, share photos, and learn about the world. But, it can also affect our mental health in both good and bad ways. This essay will explore these effects.

Positive Effects

First, let’s talk about the good things. Social media can make us feel connected. It allows us to keep in touch with friends and family, even if they live far away. This can make us feel less lonely. It can also help us find people who share our interests. For example, if you love painting, you can join an art group online. This can boost your confidence and make you feel part of a community.

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That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Effects Of Social Media On Family Relationships
• Essay on Effects Of Social Media
• Essay on Effects Of Poverty On Health

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Impact of Social Media Use on Mental Health within Adolescent and Student Populations during COVID-19 Pandemic: Review

Marija draženović.

1 Leadership and Management of Health Services, School of Medicine, University of Zagreb, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia

Tea Vukušić Rukavina

2 Andrija Štampar School of Public Health, School of Medicine, University of Zagreb, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia

Lovela Machala Poplašen

Associated data.

Data are contained within the article.

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed our lives. By increased screen time during the pandemic, social media (SM) could have significantly impacted adolescents’ and students’ mental health (MH). This literature review aims to synthesize the research on the impact of SM usage on MH of adolescents and students during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. A review of the published literature was conducted in April 2021, through a search of PubMed and Web of Science Core Collection databases. The search yielded 1136 records, with 13 articles selected for this review. Most of the included studies observed the negative impact of SM use on MH of adolescents and students, most noticeably observed were anxiety, depression and stress. More active and prolonged SM usage was associated with a negative impact on MH of adolescents and students. Two studies recorded some potentially positive effects, such as support in coping and providing a sense of connection for those who were isolated due to social distancing measures. Since this review focuses on the early period of the pandemic, future studies should investigate the long-term impact of SM use on adolescents and students MH, with all relevant elements that can enable adequate public health response.

1. Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic is not the first pandemic in the history of humanity, but it is undoubtedly the most severe one since the influenza pandemic in 1918. It has led to unprecedented mitigation efforts that disrupted the daily lives of most of the world’s population.

Beyond the general health repercussions of the pandemic itself, these mitigation mandates, including school closures and widespread lockdowns, combined with economic instability, fear of infection and uncertainty for the future, also present a challenge to the mental health (MH) of many [ 1 ]. In particular, this might affect adolescents and students, who highly rely on social contact with their peers [ 2 ].

MH is most affected by internal and external stressors during adolescence. The effect of stress in adolescents is exacerbated when accompanied by other stressors, such as the lack of sufficient internal or external resources or poorly developed coping skills [ 3 ]. Being deprived of social contacts and forced to adjust to online education, while going through a critical developmental stage, adolescents and students might suffer more severe effects of the COVID-19 pandemic-related stressors than the general population [ 4 ].

As reported by UNESCO, at its peak, the pandemic had a significant worldwide impact on the lives of more than 1.6 billion students [ 5 ]. In China, nearly 40.4% of the sampled youth were prone to psychological problems, and 14.4% suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms [ 6 ]. Social media (SM) has been gaining an increasingly prominent role in adolescents’ lives in recent decades, especially in recent years. In 2018, 45% of teens said they use the internet “almost constantly”, a figure nearly doubling from the 24% in the 2014–2015 survey. An additional 44% said they go online several times a day, indicating that roughly nine-in-ten teens go online at least multiple times per day [ 7 ].

SM has become an increasingly important part of adolescents’ daily lives [ 7 ] and the COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated this trend [ 8 , 9 ]. Many adolescents and students have turned to SM to stay connected with their friends and peers and access information and entertainment during a time when in-person interactions have been greatly restricted [ 10 , 11 ].

SM provides data on the pandemics, but also makes available lots of misinformation. The positive impact of SM during the lockdown is the provision of valuable means for social contact. Still, it can also cause poorer sleep quality, lower self-esteem and higher levels of anxiety and depression [ 12 ]. US-based research [ 7 ] investigating the impact of SM on teen lives, found that a plurality of teens (45%) believe SM has neither positive nor negative effect on people of their age. Roughly three-in-ten teens (31%) say SM impacts mostly positively while the remaining 24% describe its effect as mostly negative. The most significant positive impact of SM use is connecting with friends and family [ 7 ]. The study by Coyne et al. [ 13 ] found that the time spent using SM was unrelated to individual changes in depression or anxiety. Contrariwise, a study by O’Reilly et al. [ 14 ] observing adolescents between 11–18 years suggested that adolescents perceived SM as a threat to mental well-being. SM can provide a sense of connection using technology to connect and support those isolated or feeling isolated due to physical social distancing measures [ 15 ]. It can also be a useful tool for staying informed about the latest developments related to the pandemic and accessing resources and support [ 16 ]. In contrast, the main negative impacts include bullying/rumor spreading, harm to relationships due to lack of individual contact, unrealistic views of others’ lives and the onset of distraction/addiction [ 7 ].

This study aims to synthesize the existing research on the impact of SM use during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, related to the MH of adolescents and students. The following questions guided our inquiry: Does SM use during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic have a predominantly positive or negative impact on MH within the adolescent and student population? Which MH components have been impacted the most by SM use during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic within the adolescent and student population?

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. design.

This literature review was conducted in accordance with the guidelines for the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses [ 17 ], with minor modifications where appropriate.

The need to assess the impact of SM use during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic on MH of adolescents and students is an important health issue. The narrative qualitative synthesis was undertaken with the guidance of the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) 2020 Statement [ 18 ].

2.2. Search Strategy

A literature search was performed on 30 April 2021 using two databases, PubMed and Web of Science Core Collection.

The searches were conducted using the following defined search terms: (“covid 19” [MeSH Terms] OR “covid 19 vaccines” [MeSH Terms] OR “covid 19 serotherapy” [All Fields] OR “covid 19 nucleic acid testing” [MeSH Terms] OR “covid 19 serological testing” [MeSH Terms] OR “covid 19 testing” [MeSH Terms] OR “sars cov 2” [MeSH Terms] OR “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2” [All Fields] OR “ncov” [All Fields] OR “2019 ncov” [All Fields] OR “coronavirus” [MeSH Terms] OR “cov” [All Fields]) AND (“social media” [MeSH Terms] OR “social networking” [MeSH Terms] OR “twitter” [All Fields] OR “youtube” [All Fields] OR “WeChat” [All Fields] OR “Sina” [All Fields]) AND (“mental health” [MeSH Terms]). The search strategy was limited to studies published in English. The full search strategy used for each database has been included in Supplementary Table S1 .

2.3. Study Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

Studies were included in this review if they were original research focused primarily on the impact of SM use during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, related to the MH of adolescents and students.

Studies were excluded from this review if they were not in English; were not original primary research: reviews, reports, abstracts only, case studies, letters, opinions, commentaries, policies, guidelines or recommendations; did not focus primarily on the SM use effect on MH of adolescents or students; and if SM posts were used for content analysis, which was not focused on MH issues.

2.4. Data Collection Process and Extraction

Following the search, conducted by an information retrieval specialist (LMP), all references captured by the search engine were uploaded into the reference management software Zotero 6.2 (the Corporation for Digital Scholarship, Virginia, and the USA). Duplicates were identified and removed by MD. The remaining references were uploaded into the Rayyan collaborative tool [ 19 ]. Rayyan is a web application and mobile app for systematic reviews. It eases the process of the initial screening of abstracts and titles and helps researchers save time when they share and compare include-exclude decisions.

Initial screening was done by two researchers (MD and TVR) limiting results to those that complied with eligibility criteria. Full texts of 25 papers were assessed for eligibility in detail against the inclusion and exclusion criteria for the review. Thus, a total of 13 studies were finally included in this review. Any disagreements between the reviewers at each stage of the study selection process were resolved through discussion.

One author (MD) used a standardized form developed by the research team to extract the details of the included studies. Data were extracted from each study, including: (1) the first author and year of publication, (2) the study title, (3) the country of origin, (4) the study objective, (5) the study design, (6) the study method/sampling, (7) sample characteristics, (8) mental issues observed, (9) positive vs. negative SM impact on MH observed and (10) main results and conclusions relevant to the impact of SM use on MH of adolescents or students. A second author (TVR) verified the extracted information and checked for accuracy and completeness. Differences were resolved through discussion. The agreed evidence was then synthesized narratively.

2.5. Assessment of Risk of Bias

The risk of bias was graded according to the JBI Critical Appraisal tool, “Checklist for Analytical Cross-sectional Studies” and “Checklists for Cohort Studies” [ 20 ] by one experienced reviewer (TVR). The evaluation was based on answers to 8 questions (yes, no, unclear or not applicable, for cross-sectional studies) or answers to 11 questions (yes, no, unclear or not applicable, for cohort studies). The studies were classified as having low (>70%), moderate (40–70%) or high (<40%) risk of bias.

2.6. Data Synthesis

Data were analyzed according to the study outcomes and objectives. Descriptive (narrative) analyses of the included studies were conducted. A narrative synthesis was undertaken with the guidance of the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses) 2020 Statement [ 18 ]. A narrative synthesis accompanies the tabulated results from the study characteristics and describes: how the results relate to the review’s objective and questions; did SM use during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic have a predominantly positive or negative impact on MH within the adolescent and student population; and what are the recognized positive and negative impacts.

3.1. Search Results

The literature search retrieved 1136 records (641 from PubMed, 495 from Web of Science Core Collection) and after removing duplicates 806 titles and abstracts were screened. Following title and abstract screening, a further 781 articles were excluded leaving 25 to be screened by full text. Twelve articles did not meet the eligibility criteria following full text screening. Thus, a total of 13 studies were finally included in this review [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 ].

The PRISMA flow diagram of the study selection and review process is displayed in Figure 1 .

PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses) flow diagram of the study selection and review process.

3.2. Methodological Characteristics of the Studies

Characteristics of the included studies are shown in Table 1 . Out of 13 studies included in this review [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 ], all are observational and the majority (11) [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 31 , 33 ] are cross-sectional. Out of a total of 11,975 participants, 584 were observed within two longitudinal studies [ 30 , 32 ].

Methodological Characteristics of Included Studies.

SM—social media; RR—response rate; OpenEpi—free and open-source software for epidemiologic statistics.

The total number of participants in these 13 studies was 11,975, ranging from 49 [ 32 ] to 2449 [ 24 ] participants in a single study.

Out of 13 eligible studies, 3 originated from the USA (observing a total of 1235 participants) [ 27 , 31 , 32 ], 2 originated from China (observing a total of 1047 participants) [ 23 , 30 ], 2 from Belgium (observing a total of 4173 participants) [ 26 , 28 ] and 1 originated from each: Bangladesh [ 21 ], Turkey [ 22 ], Japan [ 24 ], Pakistan [ 25 ], Canada [ 29 ] and Palestine [ 33 ], providing a relatively representative sample of student/adolescent population from North America [ 27 , 29 , 31 , 32 ], Asia [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 30 , 33 ] and Northwestern Europe [ 26 , 28 ] including the countries on various levels of development and wealth.

Participants in the studies were described as adolescents, elementary, high school or university students. Therefore, the participants ranged from 6 [ 33 ] to 48 [ 27 ] years old. The mean (in some cases average) age of participants (with the exclusion of studies where such data is not available) spans from 10.32 [ 30 ] to 22.92 [ 27 ] years old. Therefore, a limited number of adults [ 27 ] among the participants included in some studies is not considered a population with a significant impact on the study results. Additionally, we observed that the majority of participants in most of the studies were female [ 22 , 23 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 ] (even up to 87.6%) [ 27 ].

Most studies used online questionnaires or surveys [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 ], recruiting participants through the internet or social networks [ 21 , 23 , 24 , 26 , 28 , 29 , 31 , 32 , 33 ]. In some cases, the participants were recruited through institutional e-mails [ 24 ], via school [ 26 , 30 ], national news outlets [ 28 ] or within specific classes [ 27 ]. One longitudinal study [ 32 ] used individual-level online data (Google Search and YouTube) to analyze and correlate to the data collected via questionnaires before and during the pandemic.

Online questionnaires were generally organized in sections, with the first section collecting primary data on students and the following sections collecting specific data necessary for measuring behaviors that might impact MH and indicators of the MH condition. Some studies used a variety of original or somewhat modified validated questionnaires and scales (e.g., PHQ-9 [ 21 , 24 , 31 , 32 ], GAD-7 [ 21 , 26 , 31 , 32 ], RULS [ 26 , 28 , 29 ]) and DASS-21 [ 27 , 30 ]), while in the majority of the studies questionnaires and the measures used in them were a combination of validated and self-developed instruments [ 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 32 ]. One study used a questionnaire for which the validation status could not be established [ 33 ].

3.3. Objectives and Outcomes of Included Studies

The objectives and outcomes of included studies are shown in Table 2 . Several MH disorders or issues have been observed and measured in the papers. Depression [ 21 , 24 , 27 , 29 , 31 , 32 ], anxiety [ 22 , 26 , 27 , 29 , 31 , 32 ] and stress [ 23 , 27 , 29 ] were listed in three or more studies, while panic [ 33 ], addictive SM use [ 23 ], mental and psychological distress [ 28 , 30 ], worsening of sleep pattern, lack of motivation and family arguments [ 25 ] were connected to SM use in two or fewer studies. Additionally, a nonspecific MH disorder—MH imbalance [ 21 ]—was linked to SM use.

Objectives and Outcomes of Included Studies.

BASE-6—Brief Adjustment Scale-6, BFAS—Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale, BSI—Brief Symptom Inventory, BSMAS—Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale, CAS—Coronavirus Anxiety Scale, CBQ—College Belongingness Questionnaire, CESD—Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale, CTS—COVID Threat Scale, DASS-21—Depression Anxiety Stress Scales 21, ECS—Emotion Contagion Scale, GAD-7—The General Anxiety Disorder Scale, GHQ-12—General Health Questionnaire, ICG-RC—Inventory for Complicated Grief-Revised for Children, IGDS-SF9—Internet Gaming Disorder Scale-Short Form, ISI—Insomnia Severity Index, MH—mental health, NEG—negative, OCD—obsessive compulsive disorder, OCI-R—Obsessive Compulsive Inventory-Revised, OSSS-3—3-item Oslo Social Support Scale, PC-PTSD-5—Primary Care Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Screen for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5, PHQ-9—Patient Health Questionnaire-9, POS—positive, PSS—Perceived Stress Scale, RULS-Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale, SABAS—Smartphone Application-Based Addiction Scale, SITBI—Self-Injurious Thoughts and Behaviors Interview, SM—social media, SN—social network.

Active and increased, and daily use of SM was associated with an increased risk of depressive [ 24 , 27 , 29 , 31 ], anxiety [ 31 ] and stress [ 27 ] symptoms. Additionally, individuals with increasing anxiety or depressive disorders during the pandemic usually had longer sessions using SM [ 32 ].

The interaction between COVID-19 stress and SM use was also significant [ 29 ]. Individuals suffering more COVID-19 stress had an increased risk of addictive SM use, which has been fostered by active use and flow experience [ 23 ].

A significant positive statistical correlation was found between SM and spreading panic concerning COVID-19 [ 33 ].

Time spent on SM explained problematic SM use, and problematic SM use subsequently explained psychological/mental distress [ 30 ] with odds of psychological/mental distress 3-fold greater for those with an increase in SM use for more than three hours [ 28 ].

This review has found that most reviewed papers report predominantly negative impacts of SM use in the COVID-19 pandemic on MH of adolescents [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 ].

Several reviewed studies revealed that increased SM use was related to the MH disorders of students, such as depression, anxiety and stress [ 22 , 23 , 24 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 31 , 32 ]. It also correlated with tiredness, lack of motivation and negative impact on family arguments [ 25 ]. Such increased SM use was found to be connected to problematic [ 30 ] and addictive SM use [ 23 ], potentially leading to mental distress [ 28 , 30 ] or MH imbalance [ 21 ], and interacting with COVID-19-related stress [ 23 , 29 ]. College belongingness, which influenced student psychological adjustment, was found to be moderated by SM addiction [ 22 ].

Two studies, however, indicated some potentially positive influences of SM on MH, such as long periods of sleep [ 25 ] and support in coping through humoristic content and positive exchange in SM [ 26 ].

Results of a few studies highlighted the gender difference, indicating that more women than men were found to experience significant mental distress [ 28 , 29 ].

Among the negative impacts of increased or problematic SM use on the MH of adolescents and students most noticeably observed are depression [ 24 , 27 , 29 , 31 , 32 ], stress [ 23 , 27 , 29 ] and anxiety [ 22 , 31 , 32 ].

3.4. Risk of Bias

The risk of bias in 85% (11/13) of the included studies was classified as low [ 21 , 24 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 31 , 32 , 33 ], according to the JBI Critical Appraisal tools [ 20 ], as presented in Table 3 a,b. In total, only two studies showed a moderate risk of bias [ 22 , 25 ].

(a) Assessment of Risk of Bias. The Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) Critical Appraisal tool. Checklist for Analytical Cross- Sectional Studies [ 20 ]. (b) Assessment of Risk of Bias. The Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) Critical Appraisal tool. Checklist for Cohort Studies [ 20 ].

* NA = Not Applicable. ** Low risk of bias >70%; Moderate risk of bias 40–70%; High risk of bias < 40%. The percentage was calculated according to have many “yes” each study got relative to the applicable items.

4. Discussion

4.1. principal findings.

A significant impact of SM on the lives of adolescents and students was evident even before the COVID-19 pandemic and it resulted in both positive and negative outcomes [ 2 , 3 , 14 , 34 ]. Some previous studies indicated that the influence of SM use on MH of adolescents might be mostly neutral, even for adolescents suffering from depression and anxiety [ 7 , 13 ].

The studies included in this review originate from multiple countries, providing a sample of the student/adolescent population from North America, Asia and Europe, thus including countries on various levels of development and wealth.

According to this literature review, the influence of SM use on the MH of adolescents and students during the COVID-19 pandemic has been significant. The findings of this review indicate that SM use was predominantly associated with the mental ill-being of adolescents and students during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 ], most commonly related to MH problems, such as depression, anxiety and stress [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 31 , 32 ], which is in line with recent publications regarding SM use and its influence on MH of the younger population during the COVID-19 pandemic [ 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 ].

Among the articles reviewed in our study, seven studies investigated association between SM use and stress [ 21 , 23 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 ], but the term stress was used inconsistently. It was presented as stress in general [ 27 , 31 ], COVID related stress [ 23 , 29 ] or within constructs of mental distress [ 28 ], psychological distress [ 30 ] or MH imbalance [ 21 ].

Two studied stress described as COVID-19 related, either as stressful events [ 30 ] or reported stress associated with the initial COVID-19 crisis [ 29 ].

Zhao et al. [ 23 ] assessed participants experience of COVID-19 related stressful events. COVID-19 stress was significantly positively correlated with active use, SM flow and addictive SM use. Ellis et al. [ 29 ] assessed COVID-19 stress, using an adopted version of the Swine Flu Anxiety scale. Items were designed to assess fear about the spread of COVID-19 and the possibility of being infected and specific adolescents concerns that may result from physical distancing. They have also assessed depression (using six-item depression subscale of the Brief Symptom Inventory—BSI) and measured participant loneliness (using the revised UCLA Loneliness Scale—RULS). COVID-19 stress was a significant predictor of depression. The interaction between COVID-19 stress and SM use was also significant. The analysis revealed that the relationship between COVID-19 stress and depression was strongest among adolescents who reported the highest SM use after the pandemic as compared to adolescents with lower and average use ( p < 0.001).

Three studies assessed psychological distress, but under different terms, as mental distress [ 28 ], psychological distress [ 30 ] or MH imbalance [ 21 ].

Rens et al. [ 28 ] used GHQ-12 for the assessment of mental distress. Their results indicate experiencing mental distress were significantly higher among those with small or large increase in SM use. Chen et al. [ 30 ] investigated the changes in time spent on use of internet-related activities, changes in problematic use of internet-related activities and changes in psychological distress before and during the school suspension period due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Using 21 items embedded within three subscales of depression (seven items), anxiety (seven items) and stress (seven items), the DASS-21, they have assessed psychological distress. According to their results, increased and problematic SM use is significantly associated with psychological distress. Alam et al. [ 21 ] measured stress level using Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), but they also assessed depression (using PHQ-9) and anxiety (using GAD-7). They use the term MH imbalance, which was constructed and categorized in four categories, using cluster analysis combination among three MH scales (PSS, GAD-7 and PHQ-9). Students were categorized into four categories of MH imbalance, where 4.32% had mild, 72.7% had moderate, 12.57% had moderately severe and 10.41% suffered from severe MH imbalance. Since psychological distress refers to non-specific symptoms of stress, anxiety and depression [ 42 ], the term MH imbalance used in Alam et al.’s study [ 21 ] can be presented also as psychological distress. Their results showed that students spending more time on SM (22.60%) were more likely to be severely depressed, anxious and stressed, or as they stated “in severe MH imbalance”.

Depression Anxiety Stress Scale 21 (DASS-21) was also used by Wheaton et al. [ 27 ]. Their results indicate that hours per day of SM use weakly yet significantly related to concern about COVID-19 that are linked to stress and depression, but not anxiety and OCD. In this study terms psychological or mental distress were not used.

Murata et al. [ 31 ] assessed depression symptoms (using PHQ-9), anxiety symptoms (using GAD-7), PTSD symptoms (using PC-PTSD-5), perceived stress (using Perceived Stress Scale—PSS), lifetime suicidal ideation and behavior (using SITBI) and prolonged grief reactions (using ICG-RC). According to the findings of this study, adolescents were significantly more likely to report clinically significant depression, anxiety and PTSD symptoms, suicidal ideation or behavior, perceived stress and sleep problems compared to adults. Adolescents with more hours spent on SM were more likely to have moderate to severe depressive and anxiety symptoms.

This review found a link between increased SM use and depression [ 24 , 27 , 29 , 31 , 32 ], which is consistent with the findings in recent research where SM exposure [ 38 ] and excessive SM networking site usage [ 39 , 40 ] were associated with increased depression. Research has shown that the more time adolescents and students spend on SM, the more likely they are to experience negative effects on their MH [ 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 ], that excessive use of SM can contribute to feelings of loneliness [ 39 ], anxiety [ 36 , 40 ] and depression [ 36 , 38 , 39 , 40 ]. This is particularly true for those who compare themselves to others on SM [ 44 ] and experience cyberbullying [ 45 , 46 ].

Results were similar when looking at anxiety. This review found that adolescents with more hours spent on SM were more likely to have moderate to severe anxiety symptoms [ 31 ]. Similarly, individuals with increasing anxiety symptoms during the pandemic usually conduct longer sessions when engaging with SM (YouTube) [ 32 ].

Recent research confirms this and finds that anxiety scores were higher in those who used the SM for more than 7 h per day, compared to those who used it for 0–2 or 3–4 h [ 36 ] and that excessive time spent on SM platform was associated with a greater likelihood of having anxiety symptoms [ 40 ].

Other research also shows that the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing MH problems among adolescents [ 47 ] and SM may exacerbate these problems [ 48 ]. For example, the constant stream of news and information about the pandemic on SM can lead to increased levels of stress and anxiety [ 49 ]. Additionally, the lack of in-person social support and the increased reliance on SM for social interaction may contribute to feelings of loneliness [ 34 ]. There is also some evidence to suggest that SM use may interfere with sleep quality and quantity among adolescents and students, which can negatively affect their overall MH and well-being [ 50 , 51 ].

Even though the majority of the studies in this review associate increased or problematic use of SM with a predominantly negative impact on the MH of adolescents and students during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, two studies, however, indicated some potentially positive influences of SM on MH, such as long periods of sleep [ 25 ] and support in coping through humoristic content and positive exchange in SM [ 26 ]. A similar beneficial effect of SM use was also observed by other studies, which found that SM can provide a sense of connection and support for those who are isolated or feeling isolated due to social distancing measures [ 43 ] or SM was observed to offer a helpful way of educating and reaching adolescents to promote mental well-being and cope with emotional burdens [ 52 , 53 ]. Additionally, other publications found SM useful in providing information about MH [ 43 , 53 ] and substituting live social contacts [ 54 ].

Contrarily, SM was used by some to seek support for suicidal thoughts and self-harm [ 36 ] and also contributed to poor MH through validation-seeking practices, fear of judgment, body comparison, addiction and cyberbullying [ 43 ]. A result from a longitudinal study conducted in Sweden, with a 2-year long follow-up, suggests that increased use of SM might be an indicator, rather than a risk factor for MH symptoms [ 55 ].

4.2. Limitations

There are several limitations to this review. The search for this literature review was performed in April 2021 using two databases, PubMed and Web of Science Core Collection. Future searches should be optimized by searching additional multi-disciplinary databases, such as Scopus, CINAHL or PsycINFO. The search for reference lists and citations would also be welcomed in the subsequent literature reviews. Only English language articles, presenting original research in a defined period were included; papers in other languages and outside the timeframe for inclusion may have identified additional relevant studies.

This review was conducted according to the guidelines for the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses [ 17 , 18 , 20 ], with minor modifications. Even though there are recommendations from the JBI that COVID-19 related reviews should, besides the comprehensive literature of multiple bibliographic databases search (e.g., MEDLINE and WoS), include a search of the gray literature and/or scanning of the references [ 56 ]; we have not performed a search of the gray literature nor scanned the references of our final sample. Searching these sources is complex because of a lack of indexing and poor functionality of the search interfaces, thus we omitted it.

The data processed in the studies that were collected were obtained from November 2019 [ 30 ] until August 2020 [ 33 ] and generally related to the first year of the lockdown. Such data represents the short-term impacts of SM use on the MH of adolescents and students. The limitations imposed on the population due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic have, however, already lasted much longer than initially expected more than two years. Therefore, the findings of this review are relevant just for the relatively short period at the beginning of the pandemic, the first 16 months of the COVID pandemic, which limits their relevance. However, this period was significant since the most severe lockdown measures were introduced globally, allowing us to review studies from that period, from a specific perspective on the impact of SM use on MH within the most vulnerable populations (adolescents and students). At the same time, the long-term impacts of SM use on the MH of adolescents and students might significantly differ from the shorter-term impacts included in the reviewed papers.

All of the studies were observational and the majority [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 31 , 33 ] were cross-sectional and went no further than describing a prevalence of the specific MH condition. Another limitation was that just two longitudinal studies [ 30 , 32 ] investigating this review’s aims could be found—limiting the time component of reviewed studies. This is probably a consequence of the data collection period occurring relatively early after the pandemic outbreak, so there was a limited opportunity for multiple subsequent research waves on the relevant population samples to be performed.

This notion is also proven by the fact that the included studies used convenient sampling, recruiting participants predominantly via SM and Internet, using online questionnaires. Those methods were the most convenient, practical and feasible methods during the lockdown. Therefore, the results of this review are based on data from the studies, dominantly based on a convenient sample.

Regarding the risk of bias, and quality of the studies in this review’s final sample, only four studies, exactly stated their response rate [ 24 , 30 , 32 , 33 ], ranging from 53% to 100%. Even though the risk of bias vas very low in 11 of 13 studies, it is important that future studies report response rates more often to increase the studies’ quality.

The age of the participants spanning from childhood (elementary school students) to adulthood, makes the review population somewhat heterogeneous. However, the mean/average age of participants, ranging from 10.32 [ 30 ] to 22.92 [ 27 ] years, makes the data used in this study relevant for the population of adolescents and students.

COVID-19 pandemic mitigation efforts have lasted much longer than the period examined in this review. Impacts of SM use during pandemics on the MH of adolescents and students in such a prolonged period might significantly differ from those observed in reviewed papers. Therefore, findings from more recent studies investigating the long-term impact of SM on adolescents and students during the COVID-19 pandemic should also be examined to identify possible differences with outcomes observed in this review.

5. Conclusions

Based on the findings of reviewed studies, we conclude that increased or problematic use of SM predominantly negatively impacted the MH of adolescents and students during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of the included studies observed the negative impact of SM on MH, while just two studies recorded some potentially positive effects, such as support in coping and providing a sense of connection for those who were isolated due to social distancing measures. Among the negative consequences of increased or problematic SM use on MH of adolescents and students, most noticeably observed were anxiety, depression and stress. Since this review focuses on the early period of the pandemic, at this point, we can only speculate about the long-term impacts of SM on MH of adolescents and students during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Future studies, especially longitudinal and studies observing the influence of different types of SM behavior and activities, could provide valuable insights and directions for dealing with the influence of SM on the MH of adolescents and students during pandemics since we are clearly facing a new pandemic—an increase of MH disorders among our youngest generations. We should be prepared for how MH care should change due to the COVID-19 pandemic and adequately respond, especially concerning MH of adolescents and students.

Supplementary Materials

The following supporting information can be downloaded at: https://www.mdpi.com/article/10.3390/ijerph20043392/s1 , Table S1: Search strategy used in PubMed and Web of Science Core Collection.

Funding Statement

This research received no external funding.

Author Contributions

M.D. and T.V.R. led the initial idea, study design and development of the protocol. The search strategy was developed by T.V.R. and L.M.P.; L.M.P. performed the searches and extracted the data files. Title and abstract screening were performed by M.D. and T.V.R. Full text screening was conducted by M.D. and T.V.R.; M.D. led on data extraction for each full text article. M.D. and T.V.R. drafted the narrative overview with support from L.M.P. All authors contributed to the interpretation of the findings. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Institutional Review Board Statement

This was a desk-based review of the literature therefore ethical approval was not required.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

Conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Disclaimer/Publisher’s Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.

The impact of social media on mental health

Online mental wellbeing.

S ocial media has become an integral part of our lives, allowing us to connect with friends, share experiences, and access information in ways that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. However, as social media usage has soared, concerns about its impact on mental health have also emerged. The constant exposure to curated and often idealized versions of other people’s lives, the fear of missing out (FOMO), and the addictive nature of scrolling through endless feeds have all been linked to negative effects on mental wellbeing.

Research has shown that excessive social media use can contribute to feelings of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and decreased self-esteem. The constant comparisons to others, the pressure to present a perfect life online, and the never-ending stream of news and updates can easily overwhelm individuals and affect their mental health.

However, despite the potential for harm, social media can also provide a platform for support and connection. When used mindfully and in moderation, it can serve as a tool for seeking help, sharing experiences, and building communities. In this article, we will explore the impact of social media on mental health and provide some digital wellness tips to help you navigate the online world in a way that promotes mental wellbeing.

Digital wellness tips

1. Set boundaries: Establish designated times for social media use and avoid checking your accounts during work or personal time. Being intentional about your online activities can help prevent excessive use and create a healthier balance between the virtual and physical world.

2. Practice mindfulness: When using social media, be aware of your emotions and reactions. Notice how certain posts or interactions make you feel and take breaks if you find yourself becoming overwhelmed or anxious. Engaging in mindfulness exercises, such as deep breathing or meditation, can also help you stay present and grounded while navigating the online space.

3. Curate your feed: Take control of your social media experience by unfollowing accounts that make you feel inadequate or trigger negative emotions. Instead, follow accounts that promote positivity, creativity, and mental health awareness. Surrounding yourself with uplifting content can have a significant impact on your overall mood and mental wellbeing.

4. Connect with others: Use social media as a tool for building genuine connections rather than just passively consuming content. Engage in meaningful conversations, participate in online support groups, and reach out to friends and family. Actively seeking connection and support can help counteract the potential loneliness and isolation that excessive social media use may bring.

5. Take breaks: Regularly disconnecting from social media can be beneficial for your mental health. Plan digital detoxes and allocate dedicated time for hobbies, outdoor activities, or quality time with loved ones. Creating space for offline experiences can help maintain perspective and reduce the risks of falling into a social media spiral.

Social media addiction

One of the most concerning aspects of social media’s impact on mental health is the potential for addiction. The constant availability and the dopamine-inducing nature of social media platforms can lead to compulsive use and a diminished sense of control over one’s online behavior.

Social media addiction, also known as problematic internet use, has been linked to various negative consequences, including poor sleep quality, low self-esteem, heightened anxiety, and decreased productivity. Additionally, excessive social media use has been associated with the development or exacerbation of mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety disorders.

Recognizing the signs of social media addiction is a crucial step towards addressing and managing the issue. Some common indicators include:

• Feeling a constant need to check social media accounts
• Difficulty in cutting back on social media use despite wanting to do so
• Neglecting personal responsibilities or relationships due to excessive social media use
• Feeling anxious or irritable when unable to access social media
• Using social media as a coping mechanism for stress or negative emotions

If you suspect that you or someone you know may be struggling with social media addiction, it is essential to seek support. Professional help from therapists specializing in digital addiction can provide valuable guidance and strategies to regain control over online habits and promote mental wellbeing.

Mindfulness in social media

Mindfulness, the practice of intentionally focusing one’s attention on the present moment, can be a powerful tool for managing the impact of social media on mental health. By cultivating mindfulness in our online interactions, we can develop a healthier relationship with social media and mitigate its potential negative effects.

Here are some strategies to incorporate mindfulness into your social media usage:

1. Set intentions: Before opening a social media app, take a moment to reflect on your intentions. Are you looking to connect with friends, gain information, or simply pass the time? Setting clear intentions can help you use social media more consciously and avoid mindless scrolling.

2. Practice self-compassion: Remember that social media is often a highlight reel of people’s lives and is not an accurate representation of reality. Be kind to yourself and practice self-compassion when comparing yourself to others. Remind yourself that everyone has ups and downs, and no one’s life is perfect.

3. Engage mindfully: Rather than mindlessly scrolling through an endless feed, engage mindfully with the content you encounter. Reflect on how certain posts or articles make you feel and question whether they align with your values or contribute to your wellbeing. This awareness can help you curate a more supportive online environment.

4. Take media breaks: Set regular intervals during the day where you disconnect from social media and engage in activities that promote relaxation and self-care. Whether it’s taking a walk in nature, practicing a hobby, or spending time with loved ones, intentional breaks can rejuvenate your mind and prevent social media from consuming your thoughts.

5. Seek offline connections: While social media can facilitate connections, it should not be a substitute for real-life interactions. Make an effort to foster meaningful relationships offline and engage in activities that bring you joy and fulfillment. Remember to strike a balance between the digital and physical realms of your life.

By practicing mindfulness in our social media usage, we can reclaim control over our online experiences and prioritize mental wellbeing. Remember, social media is a tool that can be used for both positive and negative purposes. It is up to us to cultivate a healthy relationship with it and ensure that it enhances rather than hinders our mental health.

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