How Social Media Ruins Your Mental Health

You only have limited time, so use it wisely

Jun 26, 2024

Remember that the number of seconds in your day never changes. The amount of social media content competing for those seconds, however, doubles every year or so, depending on how you measure it. (Max Fisher - the Chaos Machine)

Image created by author using Microsoft Copilot

My own experiences with social media

When we first moved off the grid, we didn’t have any internet for a while, so I was forced to reduce my screen time.

Prior to that, I found it very difficult to shed my habit of scrolling Reddit. I would often spend at least an hour on Reddit before bed. YouTube was my other guilty pleasure. Although I mostly use it for educational purposes, I noticed it started having a negative impact on me. I became highly focused on watching all the videos of my favourite YouTubers, and before I knew it, hours had passed.

One of the biggest things I noticed when I wasn’t able to do that anymore was how my mental health improved. I felt less anxious, reached for my phone less, and didn’t have that lingering feeling of ‘missing out’.

In the previous newsletter, I discussed research supporting that claim—how mental health improved for people who reduced their screen time.

However, there’s more at play.

It’s not just the amount of screen time—it’s also the type of content you consume (e.g., social media).

How the algorithm is designed to be negative

Max Fisher, in his book The Chaos Machine, talks about the negative impact of Facebook and YouTube on people’s mental health.

He goes on to talk about the effects when people take a break from social media: “The changes were dramatic. People who deleted Facebook became happier, more satisfied with their lives, and less anxious. The emotional change was equivalent to 25 to 40 percent of the effect of going to therapy — a stunning drop for a four-week break.”

In his book, he describes how social media posts compete for our attention and how the number of posts we see each day has grown exponentially.

The book explains how the algorithm favours negativity and emotions of outrage because those are the posts that get the most engagement. Social media’s goal is to keep you on their website for long enough so they will show the post that you are most likely to engage with. That’s what scares me the most.

Max Fisher explains that social media is designed like a drug; it's designed to give us a dopamine boost every time we log in, scroll, and get likes. We think we feel better, and we continue to need more and more. When we start to see it as something that acts like a drug, it becomes better to understand how harmful it is for us. He notes, “It's a drug that most of us take on average 15 times a day.”

The influence of social media on mental health

Jonathan Haidt has done an immense amount of research on the impact of social media on our mental health. He has compiled an incredible overview of studies that have been conducted about this in one google doc, which is where most of the below information comes from.

The main conclusion is that there used to be some debate about whether social media was really harmful. People would argue that ‘connecting people is a good thing’ and ‘it makes people feel less lonely’. There is now ample research to show that for people who use social media frequently, the negative impact is larger than the potential positive impact. However, it does need to be said that light users (less than an hour a day) sometimes can have a positive effect. Moderate and heavy users (more than 5 hours a day) are noticing the biggest impact.

In my previous article, I touched on the impact of screentime on our well-being.

One of the aspects mentioned in that article is sleep. Research has shown that heavy use of screen media is associated with shorter sleep duration, longer sleep latency, and more mid-sleep awakenings. The strongest associations were when people were using screens to engage in social media or to use the internet.

I used to think that being on your phone before bed was bad due to the blue light. It turns out, though, that using your phone to watch a Netflix show would be less harmful than using your phone to check your Twitter/X feed. This is because commenting and engaging with the content causes your brain to become more awake when you should actually be winding down.

There is also evidence that social media is linked to lower psychological well-being. Heavy users (vs. light) were 48% to 171% more likely to be unhappy, to be low in well-being, or to have suicide risk factors such as depression, suicidal ideation, or past suicide attempts.

There is so much more data, and if I copied it all here, you’d be a little overwhelmed. But if this interests you, I encourage you to go have a look at Jonathan Haidt’s website and the Google Doc mentioned above.

The Surgeon General’s warning

In 1965, the US Surgeon General wrote a report that linked cigarette use to lung cancer and heart disease. He mandated an unprecedented warning label on cigarette packs.

On 17th June 2024, the US Surgeon General called for a similar warning on social media. In his article in the NY Times, he writes: “The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency — and social media has emerged as an important contributor. Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms, and the average daily use in this age group, as of the summer of 2023, was 4.8 hours. Additionally, nearly half of adolescents say social media makes them feel worse about their bodies.”

For me, that’s all I need to know. It’s time to reduce our social media use right now.

How to reduce your social media use

Note the keyword here is “reduce.” We don’t need to be perfect, and we don’t need to cancel all our accounts completely.

Remember, the biggest impact was seen among heavy users. So, reducing your time spent on social media will have a great effect.

Here are a few easy things you can do right now:

Turn off your notifications for all apps: this really made a difference for me. If I want to know the latest news on Instagram or Facebook, I’ll just go to the app. I don’t need to be constantly reminded of what’s happening on these platforms.
Be selective about your content: go through your social media feed and really think about who you’re following and whether the content they’re putting out is helpful or harmful. For example, my Instagram account only follows bird-related accounts. Opening Instagram instantly makes me happy because of this.
Remove apps from your phone: consider deleting the apps from your phone and only accessing social media via the web browser. I do this for Facebook: I can only access it through the web browser, and this significantly limits my use.

Please let me know in the comments what you will be doing to reduce your social media use?

How Social Media Ruins Your Mental Health

You only have limited time, so use it wisely

Discussion about this post