A Confession from the Daughter of Parents in a “No Screens” Household

I have never owned a TV. I got my first smartphone when I was 18 years old. My parents strongly encouraged my siblings and I to develop offline hobbies however, I still found my way to social media when I was just 13 years old. Having grown up in the digital age, I feel a strange tension between defending users of social media from the “Kids these days and their phones! Argh!” adults and reluctantly acknowledging that social media can absolutely negatively impact mental health (and science agrees). Social media use is associated with upward social comparison (e.g., comparing one’s body to those of fitness influencers), exposure to extremist political ideology (e.g., red-pill content), increased feelings of loneliness when social needs are unmet (e.g., if not enough likes are received on a post), and even social media addiction when social media use begins to negatively impact daily functioning. Based on this data, you may be tempted to draw the conclusion that social media is bad however, I strongly encourage you not to. 

Throughout my training as a therapist and as a researcher in behavioural sciences, I have been reminded that any harmful behaviour, especially behaviours that may seem “addictive”, is always a reflection of an underlying concern. Addictions are symptoms. As part of my master’s thesis, I wanted to investigate young people’s use of social media. However, I frankly don’t care if social media is “bad” because that is not important to me as long as I know that there is an established pattern that young people are turning to social media (90% of those between the ages of 15 and 34 reported regularly using social media in 2018). A more productive question than “Is social media harmful?” is “Why are people using social media in the first place and how do these reasons predict harm?”. 

In my research, I focused on problematic social media use, which refers to a pattern of social media use that becomes difficult to control and begins to interfere with a person’s psychological well-being or daily functioning. This is different from simply using social media frequently. Someone can spend several hours a day online without experiencing significant problems, while another person may use social media for much less time but feel unable to stop, become preoccupied with checking their like count, or experience distress when they cannot use social media. In other words, the amount of time someone spends on social media doesn’t tell us much. 

People can use social media for a variety of reasons. Some people may use social media to escape, avoid, distract from, or temporarily relieve unpleasant emotions, anxiety, stress, or boredom. People may also use social media for stimulation or entertainment such as novel posts, visual content, and sounds that can make the experience rewarding or engaging. Attention-related reasons involve using social media to obtain attention, recognition, or validation from other people, such as through likes, comments, followers, or messages. These reasons matter because the same behaviour, scrolling on TikTok, can serve very different psychological purposes depending on the person and the moment. 

I found that using social media to escape stress or negative emotions was the strongest predictor of problematic use, followed by using social media for attention and validation. Feeling the need to use social media more and more over time, struggling to control use, or feeling uneasy when able to access it, were the most strongly associated with anxiety and depression. This suggests that the problem may not be social media itself, but rather the role it begins to play in someone’s life. If social media becomes a primary coping mechanism for managing stress, anxiety, or depression, taking it away without addressing the underlying distress may simply remove the coping strategy without addressing the reason it was needed in the first place.  

My main takeaway from this research is that saying that social media is bad is a massive oversimplification. My research suggests that social media is in many ways too good (and you know what they say about too much of a good thing). Social media offers an incredibly convenient and low-effort way to distract from uncomfortable emotions and to provide attention. What stands out to me is that users have a real desire to alleviate discomfort, suffering, and pain while connecting with others. In this sense, the goal should not necessarily be to eliminate social media use, but to understand what needs it is meeting and whether there are healthier ways of meeting those needs. 

Check in with yourself:

• Are you using social media to supplement or replace offline interactions?

• How do you feel when you don’t have access to social media?

• Are you satisfied with your current social media use?