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A recent study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders suggests that limiting social media use to one hour per day can reduce feelings of loneliness among young adults experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety. The findings indicate that this simple behavioral change tends to benefit all participants equally, regardless of their gender or how often they compare themselves to others online. These results provide evidence that managing screen time could be an effective part of treating loneliness in vulnerable populations.
Humans possess a deep biological need for social connection, which helps protect against emotional distress. When young people feel lonely, they are at a higher risk for developing or worsening symptoms of anxiety and depression. Social networking platforms were originally designed to bring people together and build communities.
Despite these original intentions, observational research frequently links heavy social media use to increased feelings of social isolation. Previous experimental studies testing this relationship have produced mixed results, often showing that abstaining from social media only has minor effects. But many of these earlier studies focused on individuals who were not experiencing emotional distress.
Because these healthy participants were not particularly lonely to begin with, they had little room for improvement. In psychological research, this is known as a floor effect, where a measurement cannot go any lower. The scientists conducting the current study wanted to look specifically at young people who were already experiencing anxiety and depressive symptoms. These vulnerable individuals often experience higher levels of loneliness.
“I have studied the impact of screens on health and mental health for many years, and given social media is the screen type that occupies the majority of screen time, and here to stay, I feel it’s important to study its impacts on development and health and wellbeing,” said study author Gary Goldfield, a senior scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute and professor at the University of Ottawa.
“Social media is a tool developed to strengthen social connections, which of course should reduce feelings of social isolation (in theory), but despite near constant digital connection, about 25% of youth feel lonely. Indeed, some studies found that high social media use was associated with greater loneliness and social isolation, not less, with some evidence to suggest high social media use displaces high quality, in-person recreational activities and social interaction with friends and family.”
“However, almost all studies were correlational, so we could not tell if high social media use led to greater loneliness or whether greater loneliness led people to use more social media use to try to feel more socially connected and less isolated. To address the issue of causality, we ran an experiment in youth with symptoms of distress who we considered a group vulnerable to some of the psychologically harmful elements of social media, such as negative social comparisons.”
Social comparison is the habit of evaluating one’s own life based on the curated, often idealized lives others present online. People often edit their online profiles to over-represent positive experiences, a phenomenon known as a positivity bias.
This creates an environment where users constantly view the best moments of others, which can trigger feelings of inadequacy. Social media provides almost countless opportunities for these unfavorable comparisons because the number of online connections usually exceeds real-life friendships.
For their study, the researchers recruited undergraduate students from a Canadian university. The initial sample included 260 young adults between the ages of 17 and 25. To participate, individuals had to own a smartphone and use social media for at least two hours a day. They also had to report experiencing symptoms of anxiety or depression. The study began with a one-week baseline period to track normal behavior.
Participants used the built-in screen time tracking features on their smartphones to monitor their daily usage. They sent daily screenshots of these reports to the scientists to provide an objective measure of their habits. Participants also completed questionnaires to measure their baseline levels of loneliness and their tendency to compare themselves to others online.
Following the baseline week, the scientists randomly divided the participants into two groups for a three-week experiment. The intervention group was instructed to restrict their social media use to a maximum of one hour per day. The control group received no instructions and was told to continue using their devices as usual.
Out of the original group, 219 participants completed the entire four-week study and were included in the final analysis. The intervention group successfully followed the instructions, cutting their daily social media time by an average of 78 minutes, which amounted to a 50 percent reduction. The control group kept their usage relatively stable throughout the experiment.
At the end of the three weeks, the scientists assessed the participants’ loneliness levels again using a standardized psychological survey called the UCLA Loneliness Scale. The researchers found that the group asked to limit their social media use showed a significant decrease in loneliness compared to the control group. The control group experienced almost no change in their feelings of isolation.
This provides evidence that cutting back on social media actively reduces feelings of loneliness in distressed youth. The scientists noted that the intervention aligns with behavioral displacement theory. This theory suggests that time spent on social media replaces time that could be spent on direct, in-person social interactions. By limiting screen time, individuals likely freed up time to connect with friends and family in the real world.
“I think the important takeaway is that high social media use is harmful to mental health and can make people feel more lonely and isolated, and reducing social media and connecting with friends and family in-person is a much more potent way of promoting social connection and alleviating loneliness,” Goldfield told PsyPost. “In short, although socially connecting online is more convenient, there is no substitute for real-life human interaction.”
When looking at the secondary variables, the scientists found no differences based on gender. Men and women experienced the same level of improvement in their loneliness scores after reducing their screen time.
Similarly, a participant’s baseline tendency to engage in social comparison did not change the effectiveness of the intervention. Limiting social media usage helped reduce loneliness across the board, regardless of these individual traits.
“Due the sheer number of social comparisons made regularly on social media that increase with exposure, we thought reducing social media would reduce social comparisons with less exposure, and that those who were high in social comparison before the intervention would show greater reductions in loneliness, given high social comparison is associated with greater loneliness,” Goldfield said. “The relationship between social media and mental health has been shown to be stronger in girls than boys in some studies, so we also thought that maybe girls would therefore benefit more from reducing compared to boys, but they don’t.”
As with all research, there are some limitations. The sample consisted mainly of female undergraduate psychology students who volunteered for a study about reducing screen time. This means the participants might have already been highly motivated to change their habits. Because of this specific demographic, the findings might not apply perfectly to the general population or to people in different age groups.
Readers should be cautious not to interpret these findings as a complete cure for mental health conditions. The effect size of the intervention was considered small to moderate. This suggests that simply reducing social media time is unlikely to eliminate severe loneliness on its own. But reducing screen time could serve as one piece of a broader treatment strategy.
To build on these findings, the scientists are now exploring whether the benefits of limiting screen time last over longer periods and apply to younger adolescents.
“In 12-17 year old youth struggling with mental health, we are launching a study (called REWIRE) to examine the effects of a 12-week intervention designed to reduce social media time by 50% and reallocate that time to personalized non-screen health promoting behaviours (e.g., physical activity, time in nature, social time with friends/families, hobbies, leisure pursuits etc.) on mental health, cognition and brain functioning (via fMRI scans),” Goldfield said.
The study, “Reducing social media use decreases loneliness regardless of gender or level of social comparisons in youth with anxiety and depression: A randomized controlled trial,” was authored by Gary S. Goldfield, Marcus V.V. Lopes, Wardah Mahboob, Sabrina Perry, and Christopher G. Davis.
