Does Social Media Make You Feel Worse? What the Studies Found

Most people know the feeling of putting the phone down after forty minutes of scrolling and feeling slightly worse than when they picked it up, without being able to say why. Whether that adds up to real harm has become one of the louder arguments in psychology, with researchers disagreeing in public and headlines picking a side.

The research points to a less dramatic answer than either camp tends to give. On average the effect is small, and it seems to depend a good deal on how people use the apps. In trials where people cut back, some felt a bit better. None of that tells you what scrolling does to you in particular, though you can get a fair idea of that yourself in a couple of weeks.

The Average Effect Is Small

In 2019, two Oxford researchers, Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski, reanalysed large surveys from the US and UK covering more than 350,000 adolescents. Across them, digital technology use explained at most 0.4% of the variation in teenagers’ wellbeing. The association was negative, but tiny, and the authors pointed out that it was about the same size as the association between wellbeing and eating potatoes.

Orben, A. & Przybylski, A.K. (2019). “The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use.” Nature Human Behaviour, 3(2), 173-182.

That result has limits. It was correlational data about teenagers, and “digital technology use” covered far more than social media, so it can’t settle what Instagram does to a 40-year-old. A small average can also hide a minority who are affected a lot, offset by people who aren’t affected at all or who get something good out of it.

Scrolling Is Not the Same as Talking

How you use the apps seems to matter. In 2015, Philippe Verduyn and colleagues compared two kinds of Facebook use: passive, meaning scrolling through other people’s posts and photos, and active, meaning posting and messaging. In a lab experiment, and in a study that texted people several times a day to ask how they felt, passive use predicted a drop in mood over the course of the day. Active use didn’t. Envy seemed to explain part of the link, which won’t surprise anyone who has watched other people’s holidays from their own sofa.

Verduyn, P. et al. (2015). “Passive Facebook usage undermines affective well-being: Experimental and longitudinal evidence.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(2), 480-488.

In practice, messaging a friend or replying in a group you care about is a different activity from watching a feed of strangers, even though both happen in the same app and both count towards your screen time.

What Happens When People Cut Back

A 2018 experiment at the University of Pennsylvania randomly assigned 143 students either to use social media as normal or to limit Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat to 10 minutes each per day for three weeks. The limited group reported less loneliness and fewer symptoms of depression than the normal-use group, and the change was largest in those who had started out with more symptoms. Both groups became less anxious and less worried about missing out, which the authors suggested might come from simply keeping track of their use.

Hunt, M.G., Marx, R., Lipson, C. & Young, J. (2018). “No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 37(10), 751-768.

An economics study published in 2020 went bigger. It recruited about 2,700 American Facebook users and paid some of them to deactivate their accounts for four weeks. Those who deactivated freed up about an hour a day, reported slightly higher wellbeing and became a little less polarised in their political views. Once the four weeks were over, many of them used Facebook less than before.

Allcott, H., Braghieri, L., Eichmeyer, S. & Gentzkow, M. (2020). “The Welfare Effects of Social Media.” American Economic Review, 110(3), 629-676.

These are modest effects in volunteers who agreed to cut back, measured over a few weeks, and neither trial suggests that quitting will fix low mood. Trimming the habit is low-risk and easy to reverse, though, so it’s a fair thing to test on yourself. If your mood has been low most days for more than two weeks, raise it with a doctor whatever your screen time looks like.

Running Your Own Test

Two weeks is enough for a rough answer. Spend the first week using your phone as you normally would, and at the end of each day note how your mood was. In the second week, change one or two things. Keep messaging and posting if you like, but put a time limit on the feeds using the screen-time settings your phone already has. Keep the phone out of bed, and leave the apps closed for the first hour after you wake up. Then compare the two weeks.

It also helps to pay attention in the moment. After a long scroll, notice how you feel compared with how you feel after a walk or a phone call with someone you like. It sounds obvious, but it’s easy to go months without checking, and the Pennsylvania study hints that the noticing alone may do some good.

We have a community feed in Lamplit too, so we’re not going to tell you to give up social apps. What’s worth knowing is which kind of use leaves you feeling flat. The mood check-in in the Lamplit journal is a simple way to keep score during the test: three taps for your overall mood, a more specific feeling and the area of life it’s about. Do it each evening for both weeks and the journal’s analytics will show the mood trend across them. The “Tomorrow’s intention” prompt is a handy place to write down the one rule you’re trying, such as charging the phone in the kitchen.

Open your Lamplit journal and do tonight’s mood check-in. It’s free and takes three taps.