Early research shows benefits of social media break - Harvard Gazette

"A lot of the research that's been done on mental health relies on self-report: Young people are asked to guesstimate how many hours they had on different platforms over weeks or months. They're also asked to estimate the impact of that screen use on their social relationships, their sleep, their exercise, their patterns. If you asked me, "John, what was your screen time for the last two weeks and what were your sleep patterns?," I wouldn't know."

"That was some of the inspiration for this study. And it's important to note: This was not meant to be a treatment study. It was a methodological study meant to show that we can measure and understand the data in a new way using individuals' phone data, and that that can really push the field forward. What did you hope to learn? Our primary goal was to use a voluntary social media detox to understand real-time changes in how people use social media and how they felt."

A study of young adults implemented a voluntary one-week social media detox and measured mental health outcomes. Participants experienced average reductions in anxiety by 16.1 percent, depression by 24.8 percent, and insomnia by 14.5 percent. The project prioritized methodological innovation by using individuals' phone data to capture real-time social media use instead of relying solely on retrospective self-report. The work was not conducted as a treatment trial but to demonstrate feasibility of passive phone-based measurement and to advance research methods. The findings represent an initial phase of a larger research effort aimed at understanding individual variability in responses. Participants showed widely different reactions to the detox, indicating heterogeneity in effects.

Read at Harvard Gazette