One week to better health

A Simple One-Week-Long Break From Social Media Can Improve Your Health

By UNIVERSITY OF BATH 

Results of a study that asked participants to take a week-long break from social media find positive effects for wellbeing, depression and anxiety.

According to the authors of a new study, asking individuals to cease using social media for one week might result in substantial improvements in their well-being, depression, and anxiety, and could be recommended as a way to help people manage their mental health in the future.

A team of researchers from the University of Bath (UK) evaluated the mental health impacts of a week-long social media hiatus. For some research participants, this meant freeing up roughly nine hours of their week that would otherwise have been spent browsing through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok.

Their results — published on Friday, May 6th, 2022 in the US journal Cyberpsychology, Behaviour and Social Networking — suggest that just one week off social media improved individuals’ overall level of well-being, as well as reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety.

For the study, the researchers randomly allocated 154 individuals aged 18 to 72 who used social media every day into either an intervention group, where they were asked to stop using all social media for one week, or a control group, where they could continue scrolling as normal. At the beginning of the study, baseline scores for anxiety, depression, and well-being were taken.

Participants reported spending an average of 8 hours per week on social media at the start of the study. One week later, the participants who were asked to take the one-week break had significant improvements in well-being, depression, and anxiety than those who continued to use social media, suggesting a short-term benefit.

Participants asked to take a one-week break reported using social media for an average of 21 minutes compared to an average of seven hours for those in the control group. Screen usage stats were provided to check that individuals had adhered to the break. Lead researcher from Bath’s Department for Health, Dr. Jeff Lambert explains: “Scrolling social media is so ubiquitous that many of us do it almost without thinking from the moment we wake up to when we close our eyes at night.

“We know that social media usage is huge and that there are increasing concerns about its mental health effects, so with this study, we wanted to see whether simply asking people to take a week’s break could yield mental health benefits.

“Many of our participants reported positive effects from being off social media with improved mood and less anxiety overall. This suggests that even just a small break can have an impact.

“Of course, social media is a part of life and for many people, it’s an indispensable part of who they are and how they interact with others. But if you are spending hours each week scrolling and you feel it is negatively impacting you, it could be worth cutting down on your usage to see if it helps.”

The researchers now aim to expand on their research to discover whether taking a brief break might benefit different demographics (e.g., younger people or people with physical and mental health conditions). The team also wants to follow up with people for more than a week to determine whether the benefits persist. If this is the case, they believe it will become part of the treatment options used to help manage mental health in the future.

Over the past 15 years, social media has revolutionized how we communicate, underscored by the huge growth the main platforms have observed. In the UK the number of adults using social media increased from 45% in 2011 to 71% in 2021. Among 16 to 44-year-olds, as many as 97% of us use social media and scrolling is the most frequent online activity we perform.

Feeling ‘low’ and losing pleasure are core characteristics of depression, whereas anxiety is characterized by excessive and out-of-control worry. Well-being refers to an individual’s level of positive affect, life satisfaction, and sense of purpose. According to the Mind, one in six of us experiences a common mental health problem like anxiety and depression in any given week.

Reference: “Taking a One-Week Break from Social Media Improves Well-Being, Depression, and Anxiety: A Randomized Controlled Trial” by Jeffrey Lambert, George Barnstable, Eleanor Minter, Jemima Cooper and Desmond McEwan, 10 May 2022, Cyberpsychology, Behaviour and Social Networking.

DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2021.0324