For Young Adults, Limiting Social Media Use Doesn’t Improve Well-Being

What happens when young adults are asked to slash their social media use to 30 minutes a day? In a new set of studies, most did not follow through, and those who did cut back reported no greater improvement in well-being than their peers who used social media as usual.

The findings, published in an upcoming Clinical Psychological Science paper, challenge the idea that simply imposing a daily limit offers a practical route to better mental health and expose how hard that idea is to test when few people follow the limit.

For young adults who are not especially motivated to change, “there’s really no reason to expect that asking them to limit their social media use is going to result in either them being able to do that or any improvements over time,” said senior author Andrea Howard, a developmental psychologist at Carleton University.

The project attempted to replicate an influential 2018 study by Melissa Hunt and her colleagues in which undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania were assigned either to continue using social media normally or to limit Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram to 10 minutes each per day. That study found reductions in loneliness and, among participants who began with high levels of depression, depressive symptoms. It found no difference on most other measures.

Howard and her student coauthors wondered whether those reported benefits would hold up several years later, after social media had become more deeply embedded in daily life.

Across the first three studies, the researchers recruited 644 iPhone users under age 30, including students and nonstudents. Participants submitted screenshots from Apple’s Screen Time feature and completed weekly assessments of depression, anxiety, loneliness, autonomy, emotions, and life satisfaction.

Participants were randomly assigned to use social media as usual or to limit it for three weeks, generally to 30 minutes a day. The researchers also tested several variations: asking participants to interact online only with people they also knew offline, limiting the apps they believed most affected their mental health, and examining whether results differed for people who presented themselves anonymously or identifiably online.

None of those approaches produced meaningful improvements in well-being compared with normal use. The main difficulty was adherence. Participants were using social media for an average of nearly three hours a day at the outset. Of the 346 people in time-limit groups who provided later data, only 10% stayed under 30 minutes during even one study week; fewer than 5% did so during at least two weeks.

The researchers then strengthened the intervention. In a fourth study of 229 young adults, they relaxed the limit to 60 minutes and sent daily reminders. Participants assigned to cut back reduced their use somewhat, but not enough to differ significantly from the control group. More than half never met the 1-hour target on any of the 21 intervention days, and only two met it every day. Once again, the groups did not differ on any measure of well-being.

The results do not prove that reducing social media use can never help. Because so few participants adhered to the limits, the studies could not cleanly determine what would happen if people substantially reduced their use. The samples were also limited to iPhone users and consisted mostly of white women, which may limit how broadly the findings apply.

But the adherence problem is itself revealing, Howard said. Social media now serves many purposes, from entertainment and self-expression to news and maintaining friendships. “It’s not just a site; it’s an entire environment where you’re interacting, viewing content, sharing content, and expressing yourself,” she said. Removing access can therefore affect different people in very different ways.

That complexity argues against universal prescriptions. People who are distressed by their social media experiences or motivated to change their habits may still benefit from a personalized plan, gradual reductions, or continued support. “If you feel like you would like to put your phone away for a certain number of hours a day, then there’s no reason not to try it,” Howard said. “That’s a personal improvement or self-management activity.”

For parents, the research does not show that limits are useless; the studies focused on young adults, not children or younger adolescents. But Howard advises families to look beyond a countdown and ask what problem they are trying to solve. A young person who is depressed, anxious, or encountering harm online may need broader support.

“Parents should recognize that we cannot just ask people to put their phones away,” Howard said. “It’s going to require support and scaffolding to figure out a way that they can use their device in a way that works for them and you as a parent.”

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Reference

Bradley, A., Gmiro, Y., Stoakes, A., Meloff, Z., Hasan, S.J., Heaslip, A., Howard, A., (in press). Is limiting social media use feasible for young adults? A 4-study replication failure of a screen time reduction intervention. Clinical Psychological Science.