Detox from social media 1 week at a time. Your brain will thank you.
If you were to give up social media for one week, what are you afraid you’d miss out on? A cool event in your neighborhood or that moment’s viral meme? An announcement from your favorite celebrity?
For all the things you might miss, a new study suggests that you could stand to gain much more. According to a team of researchers, reducing your social media use for even just one week can radically boost mental health outcomes.
Mitigating biased results
The study, published Monday in JAMA Network Open, analyzed the social media habits of 295 participants aged 18 to 24. This demographic not only has the highest rates of social media usage but is also at the greatest risk of developing adverse mental health issues because of it. The participants were recruited over 12 months ending this March.
As opposed to previous studies on social media usage, which yield data sets based on self-reported –– and therefore inherently biased –– metrics such as screen time, communication habits, sleep patterns and physical activity, this new study employed a tracking method known as “digital phenotyping” to understand user habits.
“The association between social media use and youth mental health remains poorly understood, with recent systematic reviews reporting inconsistent and conflicting findings,” the research team wrote. “These discrepancies reflect the overreliance on self-reported estimates of use, lack of passive monitoring of behavior, and limited measurement of momentary mental health states.”
While the researchers devised a novel way to mitigate bias in their findings, they noted that participants’ reporting could’ve been influenced by a desire to deliver the expected results.
How was the study conducted?
Participants began the study with a two-week period of normal social media use to identify baseline habits. That was then followed by a one-week period, during which the cohort was told to, at most, detox from social media completely, and at the least, significantly reduce their engagement with apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and X.
Of the 295 participants, around 6% cut social media out of their lives completely for the week. Among those who didn’t, average daily use decreased from around 2 hours to 30 minutes.
Throughout the entire study period, the participants were also asked to record their mental health state, as well as their experiences and feelings in the moment. This is where the researchers had to rely on self-reported data, which could’ve skewed the results.
The more problematic the use, the better the results
What the researchers found was that, on average, participants’ anxiety fell by about 16%, while depression and insomnia dipped by nearly 25% and 14.5%, respectively. These numbers were based on self-reported assessments in conjunction with the digital phenotyping –– or passive tracking –– profiles.
The effects of a social media detox were even more pronounced in the participants who exhibited “problematic” use prior to their participation in the study. Put another way, those who were addicted to social media or developed negative social comparisons because of it also experienced the most significant improvements during the study.
“We speculate that the improvements observed during detox were associated more with a reduction in opportunities for problematic engagement,” the research team wrote, “such as negative social comparison and addictive use, rather than by reductions in overall screen time, consistent with our findings showing lesser associations between objective screen time and mental health outcomes.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
