Does Scrolling Make You Feel Worse? A Two-Week Text Message Study

A few minutes on a feed is supposed to be a break. A team at the University of Michigan checked in on young adults five times a day for two weeks to see what that break actually does to how they feel, and the answer ran the wrong way.

What the researchers did

The study, by Kross and colleagues, was published in PLOS ONE in 2013. It followed 82 people recruited with flyers around Ann Arbor, Michigan (53 women; average age 19.5), each with a Facebook account and a touch-screen smartphone. They were paid $20 and entered into a raffle for a tablet.

The method is called experience sampling. For 14 days, each participant got five text messages a day at random times between 10 a.m. and midnight. Each text linked to five quick questions: how they felt right now, how worried and how lonely they were, how much they had used Facebook since the last text, and how much they had talked with people directly, face to face or by phone, in the same stretch. Before and after the two weeks, they also rated how satisfied they were with their lives.

Because the questions came again and again, the researchers could ask a question about order: does using Facebook between two texts change how people feel at the second one, compared with how they felt at the first?

What they found

People answered about 84% of the texts, which gave the team 4,589 check-ins to work with.

• Mood fell after Facebook. The more people had used Facebook since the last text, the worse they felt at the next one, even after accounting for how they had felt before.
• Feeling bad didn't send them to Facebook. The reverse link didn't hold: how people felt at one text didn't predict how much they used Facebook before the next. Loneliness did predict more use, but the drop in mood after Facebook remained when loneliness was taken into account.
• Life satisfaction slipped too. The more people used Facebook over the two weeks, the more their satisfaction with life declined from the start of the study to the end.
• Talking to people did the opposite. Direct contact, face to face or by phone, predicted feeling better, not worse.

None of this depended on the size of people's networks, how supportive they found them, why they used Facebook, their gender, self-esteem, loneliness or depressive symptoms.

What the study can't tell you

This was not an experiment. Nobody was told to use Facebook more or less, so the timing of mood and use suggests a direction without proving one. The authors call the effects small. Mood was a single question on a scale from very positive to very negative, so the study can't say whether people felt less good, more bad or both.

The sample was 82 mostly college-age people in one American town, and the platform was Facebook in 2013, before today's endless short video feeds. Later trials that asked people to cut back or take a break have tested the direction more directly, with mostly encouraging results.

What it means for your phone

The useful idea is in the gap between texts: what a feed does to you shows up a little later, when you've already put the phone down and something feels slightly worse. If you notice that pattern in yourself, the time you hand to the feed is worth guarding, and the time you hand to people directly seems to pay back.

That's the trade Unrotten is built around: choose the apps that take your time, give them a daily limit with Less scrolling, and watch the MindBattery recharge with time away from them. For why bad news in particular is so hard to stop reading, see our guide to doomscrolling, and for the bigger picture, social media addiction.