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They reveal how the frequency of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok impacts mental health.
Depression and anxiety levels were lowered in those who reduced their time on platforms.
Social networks have become a great research factor about the routine, habits, lifestyle, physical and mental health of people, since digital platforms are part of practically everyone’s daily life as they are the easiest and most immediate way to form communities.
The space in which the new generations build their own identity and where one in four people express themselves for their emotional and psychosocial development has become a case of continuous analysis. Until January 2022, the total number of social network users on the planet was more than 4,623 million, according to the Digital report prepared by Hootsuite and We Are Social.
Social media is here to stay and has evolved faster and faster, both for citizens and for brands that seek to get closer to it, since it increased the way of interacting with others and transferred all the weight of a physical life to a digital one, including mental health disorders.
A recent study from the University of Bath revealed that giving up on social media for a week could lead to significant improvements in users’ emotional well-being, reducing their levels of depression and anxiety.
“We know that the use of social networks is enormous and that there is increasing concern about its effects on mental health”explains researcher Jeff Lambert in the paper.
According to the researchers, disconnection could be recommended in the future as a way to monitor people’s mental health, especially as they found positive results in the majority of participants who moved away from platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Tiktok. .
The university team found that in the UK the number of adults using social media rose from 45 to 71 per cent between 2011 and 2021, with 90 to 97 per cent of them aged 16 to 44.
The results were published in the American journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, highlighting the use of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as the top three popular platforms, with nearly 4 billion users, while TikTok experienced the highest growth during the pandemic, of up to 7.5 million connected.
To find out the impact on people’s physical and mental health, the study brought together 154 users between the ages of 18 and 72, who were randomly assigned one of two options: an intervention group that had to leave all networks for a week, or a control group, in which they could continue browsing normally.
“Many of our participants reported positive effects of being off social media with better mood and less anxiety overall. This suggests that even a small break can have an impact (…) In his opinion, Social media is a part of life, and for many people, an indispensable part of who they are and how they interact, but if you spend hours each week scrolling and feel like it’s negatively affecting you, it might be worth cutting back on your usage to see if it helpsLambert says.
At the beginning of the survey, baseline scores on anxiety and depression were taken into account, recording the changes of the participants who reported spending an average of eight hours per week connected on digital platforms. A week later, people who took a break showed significant short-term improvements.
“Scrolling through social media is so ubiquitous that many of us do it almost without thinking from the moment we wake up until we close our eyes at night, we know that the use of social networks is enormous and that there are increasing concerns about its effects on mental health”, says the researcher.
And it is that the group that was disconnected for a week reported that after the study they managed to use the networks for an average of 21 minutes, compared to the seven hours of the control group that continued to use these communication channels normally.
For this reason, researchers now want to continue mapping and take advantage of the results to follow up in different populations (younger people or people with physical and mental health problems), in order to demonstrate the benefits that disconnection generates clinically.
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