A few minutes waiting for the train, a few minutes before bed. Before I know it, my finger has opened social media.
What's left afterward is a little tiredness and a little anxiety. In "Can you stop comparing yourself to others?" I wrote that social media is "a place where you mostly see people above you."
So if you spend less time on it, does anything change?
At 30 minutes a day, loneliness and depression went down
In an experiment with 143 American college students, participants were split into two groups. One group was asked to limit Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat to 10 minutes each per day. The other used them as usual [1].
After three weeks, the group that limited social media showed lower loneliness and depression than the group that used it as usual.
But this experiment involved only college students, and it lasted just three weeks. We can't say the same change would happen for everyone.
People who quit got a little happier
There's a bigger experiment too. In the United States, researchers paid Facebook users to deactivate their accounts for four weeks [2].
Those who deactivated spent less time online and more time on things like being with family and friends. Their subjective well-being, such as happiness, rose slightly. Even after the experiment ended, they used Facebook less for a while.
On the other hand, their knowledge of the news dropped a little. Social media isn't doing only bad things.
Not "quit social media or keep going," but
are you the one deciding how much you use it?
Don't quit. Cut back
What the two experiments have in common is that people didn't have to quit entirely: just using it less made a difference.
Here's what I want to try.
- Set a time: decide a daily limit and enforce it with your phone's settings
- Set the moments: don't open it before bed or right after waking up
- Set the purpose: open it to interact with someone, not just to scroll
As I wrote in "Is doing nothing really a waste of time?", you don't have to fill every spare minute with your phone. Time spent zoning out may have its own meaning.
You don't have to quit social media.
But I want to notice whether I'm using it, or it's using me.
The one who decides how long I look is me, not the app.
References
1. Hunt MG, 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.
2. Allcott H, Braghieri L, Eichmeyer S, Gentzkow M. (2020). The welfare effects of social media. American Economic Review, 110(3), 629–676.