STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Here is a candidate for today's least surprising yet most useful news story. It's a story about social media. A new study finds that limiting social media use, even for a week, can significantly reduce mental health symptoms in young adults. You're going to want to share this one on Facebook, NPR's Rhitu Chatterjee reports.
RHITU CHATTERJEE, BYLINE: Most studies on the impacts of social media ask users to recall how much time they spend on their phones or these platforms. But that data is often unreliable, says psychiatrist Dr. John Torous.
JOHN TOROUS: If you ask me - can you guess your screen time? - I don't think I would be right.
CHATTERJEE: Torous directs the division of digital psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. In the new study, he and his colleagues recruited nearly 400 young adults aged 18 to 24.
TOROUS: We said, for the first two weeks, we just want you to use social media like you usually do. The only difference is we're going to install this app.
CHATTERJEE: An app called MindLAMP.
TOROUS: And with your permission, we're going to record information from the phone about your social media use, say, your mobility patterns, your steps, your sleep.
CHATTERJEE: That gave them baseline data. At the end of the two weeks, they gave the participants standardized questionnaires for symptoms of depression, anxiety, insomnia and loneliness levels. Then they asked participants if they wanted to try a weeklong social media detox.
ELOMBE CONRAD: So we had 80% of participants opt into the detox.
CHATTERJEE: That's Dr. Elombe Conrad (ph), a co-author on the study. Participants were spending about two hours a day on social media - Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok.
CONRAD: During the detox, it fell to, like, 30 minutes a day.
CHATTERJEE: That was enough to reduce anxiety symptoms by 16% by the end of the week, Conrad says.
CONRAD: We had 24% decrease in depression symptoms and 14.5% decrease in insomnia symptoms.
CHATTERJEE: The results, published in JAMA Network Open, are impressive, says psychologist Mitch Prinstein.
MITCH PRINSTEIN: Hey, it usually takes eight to 12 weeks of intensive psychotherapy to see those kinds of reductions in mental health symptoms. So if you can get those with just one week of changing behavior, wow.
CHATTERJEE: Prinstein is the chief of strategy and integration at the American Psychological Association and wasn't involved in the new study. He says what's also striking about the results is that as the participants cut back on social media use, their screen time didn't go down.
PRINSTEIN: And they still showed improvements. To me, that is critical in demonstrating that it's not just screen time that's problematic.
CHATTERJEE: In other words, he says, it's social media that's likely causing the mental health impacts in the first place.
Rhitu Chatterjee, NPR News.
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