Don't Count on Quitting Social Media To Make Your Life Better
A new meta-analysis finds “no significant effects of social media abstinence interventions on positive affect, negative affect, or life satisfaction.”
Once upon a time, I was an avid social media user. Now, not so much. Social media make up a minimal part of my news diet and my day. I can pinpoint several reasons for this. But its effects are harder to gauge.
Has cutting back on social made me or my life better? I'm not sure. I'm definitely happier overall now than I was in my most prolific social media days, but my life has changed in many significant ways since then too. It's impossible to isolate any social-media-specific effect. When I am on it now—or at least on certain platforms, especially X— I notice myself getting riled up about things that don't matter, or over which I have no control. That doesn't seem ideal. Then again, in my profession, some degree of riling up can be good. I also feel more inspired when I use social media, and more connected to people and things beyond my immediate community. Ultimately, cutting back may be a net wash for my well being.
Granted, I was never someone who felt particularly bummed out by social media. I'm sure there are some people for whom its removal might make a big and positive difference.
But on the whole, most people are, it seems, like me.
Taking a break from social media has little effect on their well-being in either a positive or a negative way, a new meta-analysis in Scientific Reports suggests. "Temporarily stepping away from social media may not be the most optimal approach to enhance individual well-being," write the researchers, led by Laura Lemahieu of the University of Antwerp.
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'Abstaining From Social Media Does Not Make You Feel Better'
"Abstaining from social media has become a popular digital disconnection strategy of individuals to enhance their well-being," Lemahieu and her colleagues note. "To date, it is unclear whether social media abstinences are truly effective in improving well-being, however, as studies produce inconsistent outcomes."
To investigate further, they looked at studies examining social media abstinence and its effect on positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction.
They describe positive affect as being "characterized by emotions like enthusiasm, alertness, and energy." Negative affect features "more unpleasant feelings, such as anger, fear, and guilt."
Social media abstinence is defined as "an individual's voluntary and temporary decision to completely refrain from using one or more social media platforms on one or multiple devices."
Their analysis ultimately included 10 peer-reviewed studies, involving a total of 4,674 participants.
"The analyses revealed no significant effects of social media abstinence interventions on positive affect, negative affect, or life satisfaction," write the researchers. "Relationships between social media abstinence duration and the three outcomes were also non-significant."
Of course, it's possible that the studies in this analysis don't tell the whole story. Maybe the detoxes just weren't long enough or complete enough to produce results.
"The social media abstinence interventions that were examined were usually short (range: 1–28 days), with seven days being the most common duration," the researchers report. "The majority of the studies required participants to abstain from multiple social media platforms, with Facebook being the most prevalent one. However, the definition of social media was not entirely clear in some of the studies." And some studies asked participants to abstain from social media only on phones and tablets, not across all devices.
Still, the fact that short-term detoxes didn't have the benefits many imagine should give us pause when it comes to longer or more thorough absences from social media.
Why We Believe in Digital Detoxes, and Why We Shouldn't
Some people will likely find the results here hard to believe. It's become conventional wisdom that digital detox will make one's life better. But let's pull back a little bit and consider why that belief seems so prevalent, and why getting off Instagram and X may not be the great salve some expect it to be.
First, we have to remember that this research is necessarily dealing in generalizations. Saying that social media abstinence isn't positive across the board doesn't mean it can't be positive for some people. We all know someone (maybe quite a few of them) who can't seem to handle social media—they feel the need to be online constantly, addicted to the attention or the drama; they can't let any little sleight go or accept anyone being incorrect; they get obsessed with some particular community they abhor and devote way too much time to mocking or arguing against it. There are many flavors of People Who Need to Get Off Social Media.
Problematic users tend to be very visible and very salient—they're who we think of when we think about social media's ill effects and the potential positives of leaving it behind. There's also a well-documented phenomenon of people believing they can handle things better than the average person can. This makes it easy, even for those whose personal relationship to social media is fine, to imagine that giving up social media would probably be good for most. And presumably, those who feel personal antipathy toward social media will be even quicker to imagine that giving it up is always good.
But the fact that some people should step back from social media doesn't mean that it's universally better for people to give it up.
Spending quality time with your family, reading an engrossing novel, going for a walk, talking with an old friend, getting some exercise, enjoying a hobby—surely these all increase well-being better than being on Facebook or TikTok does, we might think. And we might be right.
But we're also being foolishly presumptuous to imagine that people are generally replacing social media time with psychically or physically enriching activities. Time previously spent on social media migh now tbe spent playing silly app games, or watching Netflix, or online (window) shopping—the kinds of activities unlikely to produce strong negative emotions but also unlikely to have profoundly positive effects on well being. Maybe it's be converted to reading political news or watching political video content, which won't necessarily make you any less anxious or angry or fearful than social media will.
Social media often fills liminal time—waiting for an appointment, riding a bus, taking a timeout from desk work, killing a few minutes between chores. It's natural that in the absence of social media, this time might be filled with other things that are neither net positives or net negatives for our well being.
The assumption that social media time inevitably intrudes on time that would otherwise be spent in more fulfilling or productive ways probably gets at a larger truth about social media and modern malaise. So much of what people find discomfiting or alarming or just off about Life These Days stems from cultural, political, and technological shifts that go way beyond social media. But because social media platforms are a very prevalent diversion, and because they grew enormously at the same time as many of these other changes, they tend to get a lot of blame for much bigger and deeper-rooted developments. This new meta-analysis, in a small but welcome way, pushes back against that fallacy.
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