Fourteen Days Without Social Media: What an Experiment Found

Delete your social media apps for two weeks and see what happens: that was the experiment psychologists at Ulm University in Germany ran over the winter of 2022 and 2023. Two things changed more for the people who quit. Several others changed for everyone, including the people who didn't quit at all.

What the researchers did

The study, by Lea de Hesselle and Christian Montag, was published in BMC Psychology in 2024. Between October 2022 and February 2023, the team recruited adults through university mailing lists, flyers, social media and eBay's classifieds. Anyone 18 or over who used a smartphone and social media, and spoke good German, could join.

After a first set of questionnaires, volunteers were randomly assigned to groups. The plan had four groups, two of them for giving up games, but 84% of the 165 usable volunteers were women, so the main analysis kept only the women and only two groups:

• The abstinence group (51 women) deleted their social media apps from their phones for 14 days and otherwise used their phones as normal.
• The control group (35 women) carried on as usual.

Most were university students, around 24 years old on average. Every day for the two weeks, everyone answered a short questionnaire about fear of missing out, loneliness, mood and screen time, which they copied from their phone's own screen time report. They answered a longer set at the start, at the end of the two weeks and again two weeks later, covering problematic smartphone use, depression and anxiety, and body image.

What they found

Screen time fell for the women who deleted the apps. Compared with the control group, the abstinence group's screen time dropped between the start and the end of the two weeks.

So did dissatisfaction with their bodies. Participants picked the figure that matched their body and the one they wished they had, and the gap between the two shrank more in the abstinence group than in the control group.

Both differences were modest: they reached significance only with one-sided tests, a lower statistical bar than usual.

Everything else improved in both groups. Symptoms of depression and anxiety, problematic smartphone use, fear of missing out and loneliness all fell over the two weeks, by about the same amount whether or not the women had quit social media, and they stayed about where they were two weeks later. The authors suggest that the intention to cut back, rather than the abstinence itself, may explain part of the change.

One more finding came from the start of the study: women with more problematic smartphone use reported more depression, anxiety and fear of missing out, but not more screen time. How people used their phones mattered more than how long.

What the study can't tell you

The sample was small, 86 women, mostly university students in Germany, so it says nothing about men, and the authors note that low statistical power left some results that pointed one way short of significance. Nobody checked that the apps were really deleted, and the instructions didn't mention social media in a browser or on another device. Screen time was typed in by hand from each phone's report.

Most important, because the control group improved too, the study can't separate the effect of quitting from the effect of taking part. Answering questions about your phone every day may be a small intervention of its own.

What it means for your phone

Two weeks off is short enough to try, and this study suggests what to expect from it: less time on your phone, and perhaps a kinder view of your own body, more than a transformed mood. If comparing yourself with the people in your feed is part of what wears on you, that alone may be worth it.

It also suggests that deciding to change, and paying attention to your use every day, does some of the work. Plan the break, then plan the return: Unrotten can bring the apps back with a daily limit, the Less scrolling goal, which locks them with Apple's Screen Time shield once the time is used up. For a step-by-step plan, read our guide to the social media detox.