In fact, research not only indicates that time spent on social media has a negligible effect on mental health indicators like depression, anxiety and stress — the result isn’t always negative, either.

Study leader and PhD candidate Chloe Jones said it is important to stress that the findings do not suggest that social media use is harmless or has no impact on mental health, however the relationship between the two is likely to have many complex layers.

“For example, a connection to a supportive online community could be a lifeline for people living in isolation, but hours of scrolling through Instagram influencers could be really useless if you have body image concerns,” said Mrs. Jones.

While most previous studies of social media use have relied on self-reported estimates from participants, researchers from the Curtin School of Population Health collected mobile phone data from more than 400 people aged 17 to 53 years to accurately measure how much time you spent on social media in the past week.

The team then compared the usage data to the participants’ levels of depression, anxiety, stress and attentional control.

They found that social media use was very weakly associated with anxiety and not with depression or stress.

It was also found to have a weak positive association with attentional control, suggesting that increased social media use is related to slightly better performance in maintaining attention.

“If we’re going to make informed decisions in this space, they need to be based on quality data, and our research shows that when you objectively measure time spent on social media, the effects are small or non-existent,” Ms Jones said. .

Supervising author Associate Professor Patrick Clarke said the study could be the starting point for future research investigating how users interact with social media and what personal characteristics might influence the effects of social media use on mental health, for better or worse. river.

“For example, while all associations were weak at best, the study found that different platforms had different effects: TikTok use saw a small positive association with attentional control, while Facebook use saw a small association with distress among users,” Associate Professor Clarke. said.

“We took the age of our users into account – we thought maybe TikTok users are just younger and therefore have better attention control – but even when we took age into account, the association was still there.

“This study only looked at how much time participants spent on social media, so what this research might signal is how much time we spend on social media might matter less for mental health than how we use it and we interact with it. .”

“Investigating the links between objective social media use, attentional control, and psychological distress” was published in Social Sciences and Medicine.