Excessive TikTok use is linked to social anxiety and daily cognitive errors

A new study published in Addictive Behaviors Reports suggests that the anxiety of missing out on social events can fuel addictive behaviors on TikTok, which in turn leads to everyday memory and attention lapses. The researchers found that excessive use of the popular short video app acts as a bridge between underlying social anxieties and a person’s tendency to forget appointments or lose focus during daily tasks. These results shed light on how the specific design of modern social media platforms might influence human brain function.

Yao Wang and Christian Montag at the Centre for Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of Macau led the investigation alongside colleagues from Germany and China. The research team set out to understand how particular psychological states push people toward excessive app usage. They wanted to see if these digital habits ultimately spill over into the physical world.

“At the moment worldwide it is debated if social media should be banned for young users, and one reason is the putative addictive nature of social media products (of note ‘social media addiction’ is not officially recognized at the moment in WHO’s ICD-11),” said Montag, a distinguished professor of cognitive and brain sciences.

“One product of high relevance for young users is TikTok. Therefore, we focused in our research on how addictive like use of TikTok would link to everyday cognitive failure, likely due to the distractive nature of TikTok. This is another concern: namely that overuse of social media might impact negatively on cognitive functions.”

The researchers focused heavily on a psychological concept known as the fear of missing out. This concept describes the persistent worry that others are having rewarding experiences without you. This feeling drives a strong desire to stay continually connected with what other people are doing.

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Psychologists divide this fear into two distinct categories. The first category is the trait fear of missing out. This represents a stable personality characteristic, meaning a person generally worries about being left out across all areas of life.

The second category is the state fear of missing out. This refers to a temporary condition tied to specific situations. It is often experienced as the immediate, context-dependent urge to check online notifications or social feeds.

The researchers also examined a phenomenon called everyday cognitive failure. This term refers to routine mental errors that happen to almost everyone occasionally. Examples include misplacing keys, forgetting why you entered a room, or struggling to maintain attention during a conversation.

Finally, the team investigated what they term TikTok use disorder tendencies. This condition involves using the short video app so excessively that a person loses control over their own behavior. It often leads to a person prioritizing the app over real-world responsibilities, causing disruptions in their normal daily functioning.

Previous investigations have shown that generic social media overuse connects social anxiety to mental lapses. The broader habit of constantly checking the internet clearly drains cognitive resources. Yet, the researchers recognized that different platforms vary widely in their architecture and design.

The research team wanted to see if the unique nature of TikTok creates a distinct psychological pathway. The platform relies on an endless feed of short videos and a highly personalized recommendation algorithm. These features are specifically built to capture and hold user attention in ways that older social networks do not.

To explore these connections, the research team analyzed data from a large survey project conducted in Germany. They filtered the original participant pool to focus exclusively on adults who actively use TikTok. They also ensured that all selected participants had fully completed the necessary psychological assessments.

This filtering process left a final group of 720 participants. The group consisted of 249 men and 471 women. The average age of the participants was roughly 38 years old.

These participants completed a series of standardized online questionnaires. The surveys measured their general personality anxieties and their situational urges to check the internet. They also measured the frequency of their everyday mental lapses by asking about incidents like bumping into people or failing to notice road signs.

A specific questionnaire was used to gauge the severity of their TikTok habits. This tool asked individuals to rate how often they experienced addictive behaviors. For example, participants rated how frequently they felt they could not stop watching videos or how often their app usage caused problems in their work lives.

The research team then used statistical software to look for patterns among the questionnaire responses. They compared the scores for social anxiety, app usage, and mental lapses. While minor gender differences were recorded, they were not statistically significant enough to change the core relationship between the three main variables.

The researchers observed a clear pattern linking these three psychological variables. People who reported a higher fear of missing out also reported experiencing more routine mental errors. This connection held true for both the stable personality trait and the temporary, situation-based fear.

Importantly, the team found that excessive TikTok use connected these two factors. The urge to constantly check the app functioned as a bridge between social anxiety and mental lapses. Psychologists refer to this bridging function as a mediation effect.

In a statistical mediation model, the primary variable does not just affect the outcome directly. Instead, it triggers a middle variable, which then causes the final outcome. The researchers suggest that the underlying fear of missing out drives a person to frequently open the app to relieve their anxiety.

This near-continuous state of checking fragments the person’s attention throughout the day. Over time, this fragmented attention drains mental energy. The brain becomes less capable of maintaining prolonged focus on real-world activities, which ultimately leads to more dropped appointments and forgotten tasks.

The researchers also uncovered an unexpected detail regarding the two types of social anxiety. They compared their new TikTok data against older survey results that looked at general social media addiction. This comparison revealed a difference in how the underlying anxieties operate.

Usually, general social media overuse is more strongly linked to the temporary, online-specific fear of missing out. People check platforms like Facebook or Instagram in response to immediate notification triggers. These older platforms rely heavily on real-time social interactions and alerts.

In contrast, addictive behavior on TikTok showed a stronger link to the stable personality trait. The underlying, constant anxiety about missing out in life generally was a better predictor of problematic TikTok use. The immediate urge to check specific online notifications mattered slightly less for this specific app.

The researchers suspect this difference comes down to the distinct design of the platform. TikTok’s highly personalized algorithm may tap directly into a user’s deeper personality vulnerabilities. The endless stream of curated content might soothe a broad, persistent anxiety rather than just answering a specific social notification.

“We showed that higher self-reported TikTok Use Disorder tendencies (hence more addictive use) indeed goes along with more self-reported cognitive failures in everyday life,” Montag told PsyPost. “In addition, we shed light in the present work on Fear of Missing Out (FoMO), a psychological process which has been linked to social media platform design: For instance, receiving a push notification can result in FoMO and the urge to check the platform to know what’s going on in one’s own social network.

“In the past, research showed that FoMO is closely linked to personality, hence some people tend to experience FoMO more than others. In our work we could demonstrate that more FoMO tendencies were linked to more cognitive failures, with this association being mediated by the aforementioned TikTok Use Disorder tendencies. In sum: more FoMO could result in more checking of TikTok content, resulting in more addictive like use of this platform and then having the consequence of being often distracted – resulting in more cognitive failures.”

The researchers noted some limitations to their investigation. The most prominent constraint is the cross-sectional design of the survey. This means the data represents a single snapshot in time.

Because the data was collected all at once, the researchers cannot definitively prove cause and effect. It is entirely possible that the relationship works in the opposite direction. People who naturally struggle with focus and memory might simply be more prone to developing an addiction to short video platforms.

Another alternative is that excessive engagement with social media creates a loop of constant social comparison. This loop could intensify a person’s baseline social anxieties over time. This would mean the app usage causes the anxiety, rather than the anxiety causing the app usage.

Additionally, the study relied entirely on self-reported questionnaires. Participants might underestimate their own app usage to appear more disciplined. They might also misjudge how often they make routine mental errors in their daily lives.

Future research could address these issues by following users over an extended period. Scientists could track changes in behavior and memory over months or years. They could also use objective tracking data from smartphones to measure exact screen time rather than relying on human memory.

Despite these limitations, the current results offer a clearer picture of how specific app designs might influence attention. It highlights the need to look at individual digital platforms rather than treating all social media as identical. As digital environments evolve, understanding these targeted psychological mechanisms remains a priority for cognitive researchers.

“My long term goals are to study more the neurobiological basis of social media and technology use including AI products such as chatbots,” Montag said. “This is one of my research areas at University of Macau. Further, we investigate other relevant online topics such as perceiving art in the online space (thescienceof.art) and the psychology of Taylor Swift fans (thefanstudy.com).”

The study, “On TikTok use disorder tendencies, fear of missing out and everyday cognitive failure,” was authored by Yao Wang, Sebastian Markett, Zhiying Zhao, and Christian Montag.