Limiting your use of social networks is beneficial and it has been proven! According to a recent scientific experiment, self-limitation has important virtues.
Communicate and share on social networks, chat with friends online… okay, but within reason! Staying on your phone too long is obviously not very smart, saying it is like pushing open doors. But research is advancing on this subject and is providing more and more tangible elements to talk about this phenomenon.
According to opinions issued in May 2023 by the American Psychological Association, two trends are closely linked: young people are using social media more and feelings of loneliness are growing. Concomitance or correlation?
Researchers at Iowa State University conducted an experiment of two weeks involving 230 students. Half of them were asked to limit their social media use to 30 minutes a day and received automated daily reminders to that effect. Result: this test group obtained significantly lower scores for anxiety, loneliness and fear of missing out at the end of the experience compared to the control group. On the contrary, going beyond this creates negative effects and amplifies the discomfort.
Of “pride” to know how to moderate
Youth in the test group who experienced “no more than 30 minutes of social media a day” also scored higher for “positive affect,” which the researchers describe as “the tendency to experience positive emotions described with words such as ‘excited’ and ‘proud’.
As a bonus, the researchers found that the psychological benefits of reducing social media extended to participants who occasionally exceeded the 30-minute daily time limit. “The lesson here is that it’s not about being perfect but about putting in the effort, which makes the difference. I think self-limitation and attention are the secret ingredients, more so than the 30-minute benchmark,” says Ella Faulhaber, a PhD in human-computer interaction and lead author of the scientific paper.