Social media detox boosts mental health, but nuances stand out

If you’ve ever thought a break from social media might be good for your head space, new research suggests you’re onto something.

In a study of young adults published in JAMA Network Open, those who participated in a one-week social media detox experienced a boost in their mental health, with symptoms of anxiety dropping by 16.1 percent, depression by 24.8 percent, and insomnia by 14.5 percent.

The findings are only the first phase in a larger research effort, says lead author John Torous, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the director of the digital psychiatry division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In this edited interview, he discusses what surprised him in the initial findings and offers a preview of the work to come.

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What has past research told us about social media use and its effects on mental health?

A lot of the research that’s been done on mental health relies on self-report: Young people are asked to guesstimate how many hours they had on different platforms over weeks or months. They’re also asked to estimate the impact of that screen use on their social relationships, their sleep, their exercise, their patterns. If you asked me, “John, what was your screen time for the last two weeks and what were your sleep patterns?,” I wouldn’t know. But a lot of the definitive research in this space has been built off these self-reports.

That was some of the inspiration for this study. And it’s important to note: This was not meant to be a treatment study. It was a methodological study meant to show that we can measure and understand the data in a new way using individuals’ phone data, and that that can really push the field forward.

What did you hope to learn?

Our primary goal was to use a voluntary social media detox to understand real-time changes in how people use social media and how they felt. The phone can help record those changes and let us see what’s happening. We measured natural usage for two weeks, then followed with a one-week detox.

What we found was interesting. For the first two weeks, we found that people used social media about two hours per day. During the detox, we found that social media time went from 1.9 hours per week to 30 minutes, which is a pretty big decrease. But what’s fascinating is that total screen time stayed about the same. So it wasn’t that people had less screen time; they just used social media less. Measuring usage on five different platforms, we found that Instagram and Snapchat were the most difficult to resist.

Did anything surprise you?

It was harder to see this from the averages, but people had wildly different reactions to the detox. Some people who felt a very high sense of depression felt better. For some people, it didn’t make a difference. Some people turned to exercise, had more steps, left their homes more. The heterogeneity of responses was tremendous to see, and that caught us off guard.

It reveals that we need to take a more nuanced approach to the social media and mental health debate. Let’s think about a tailored solution for each person and their needs. And that probably starts with objectively collecting the individual data on each person from their own phone.

What comes next?

This was Phase 1 of our research, to get a baseline. The next phase is to try a more targeted approach. For example, if we notice social media usage affecting sleep, we can target a sleep intervention. We can identify different clusters or groupings of patterns and say, “Here are the digital signals that point to this type of activity or this type of response,” and target a brief intervention to make the detox more personalized to the person.

It’s not just telling people to stop using social media. It’s saying, “Sleep is your weakness. Let’s educate you and focus on better sleep.” And that will be very exciting.

Why is this research important right now?

Massachusetts and other states have laws or initiatives in place trying to ban all phones at schools. I understand where those are coming from, but I do think there are new measurement tools that let us do more things. Like all things in healthcare, if you can measure it well and understand it, then you can really tailor and personalize.

The real story here is that in many older studies, the average misses the individual response. A digital detox is a very blunt instrument. What we’re saying is that we can probably personalize it and target what you need the most. For some people, social media does help with loneliness. There are harms of cutting it off completely for people, especially because it seems like it’s not going away. So, it’s better that we learn to manage it for each person rather than tell people we’re just going to take it away. I hope that we can get policymakers and people excited about a new generation of work in this space.