Is social media addictive? ‘Digital detox’ study suggests not

Going cold turkey on sites like Instagram and X had no noticeable impact on emotional state or cravings

A week of reduced social media usage neither increased nor decreased people’s desire to get back online, a new study finds. The lack of craving to return to social media platforms such as Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) suggests that for most people, the use of social media may not be truly addictive, the authors argue. Some experts remain skeptical, however.

“It’s a really well done study,” says Mariek Vanden Abeele, a communication scientist at Ghent University who was not involved in the research.

Because people often frame excessive social media use in terms of addiction, she says, the idea of “detoxing” from Instagram and X, as one might from drugs or alcohol, has garnered attention as well. “What do we see in this study? That actually does not work very well,” Vanden Abeele says.

As social media usage has exploded over the past decade, public discourse has fixated on its potential to erode our emotional well-being and even to addict us to likes and follows. Some research has shown that excessive usage correlates with increased depression and anxiety. In rare cases, it can resemble substance use disorders such as drug dependence or pathological gambling, complete with withdrawal-like symptoms such as cravings, loneliness, and dark moods when users go cold turkey.

But the results have not been conclusive. Some studies have indicated that instead of suffering withdrawal symptoms, people feel happier during a “digital detox,” whereas others have found no change. For this reason and others, some experts hesitate to apply the language of addiction to social media usage. “We are hugely dependent on these devices,” Vanden Abeele says. “But that does not make us pathologically addicted.”

To probe how abstaining from social media impacts emotional health—and whether doing so reveals any signs of addiction—Niklas Ihssen and Michael Wadsley, psychologists at Durham University, asked 51 student volunteers to swear off social media for 1 week—but did not restrict their access to social media, leaving the results up to the honor system. Throughout that week, surveys recorded how much time subjects spent on different smartphone apps and their emotional well-being.

The duo also put subjects through lab exercises similar to those used in some addiction studies. In one, the researchers told subjects to either approach or avoid social media icons on a screen by pressing buttons, like moving a video game character toward a target. In another, they offered longer access to social media the faster subjects could tap a space bar. After 1 week of effort to avoid social media, subjects were no more likely to gravitate much more or less toward app icons, or to mash the keyboard much faster or slower.

Overall, the findings showed no change in desire for social media over the week, the researchers report today in PLOS ONE. “What we see with social media is qualitatively different compared to drugs,” where craving or compulsive usage would be expected, Ihssen says. “We should not overpathologize normal behaviors.”

That’s not to say the social media break didn’t affect subjects at all. In fact, with less social media usage, subjects experienced a drop in negative emotions. However, positive ones subsided, too. “You take away that good feeling of seeing how many people liked your photos,” Ihssen says.

Not everyone is convinced by the study. “One week is just not long enough to see consistent or meaningful changes in well-being,” Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, said in an email. “And 51 people is not enough to get reliable results.” Ihssen says a statistical method determined the study size and that because subjects’ emotional changes mostly stabilized after a few days, avoiding social media for a longer time might not change the results much.

A few days was also long enough for most subjects to slip back into old habits, at least a little: All but seven failed to avoid social media entirely.

Most, however, significantly cut their usage—from nearly 3.5 hours down to 35 minutes per day, on average. And although the numbers crept back up in the four monitored days following the “detox” week, it remained roughly a full hour per day lower than before. This may indicate that a short-term break like this could be a starting point for people looking to cut back on social media, some experts say, even if the mental health impacts of doing so remain uncertain.

“When you teach [people] that they could do OK if they used social media for half an hour a day, they may develop better habits,” says Ofir Turel, an information systems scientist at the University of Melbourne who was not involved in the study.

Adopting a new social media “diet” like this invites a comparison to certain foods, which many experts prefer to the comparison to drugs. “You need food to survive, but the quantity and quality of what you eat really matter,” Vanden Abeele says. Similarly, she says, we often depend on social media for social contact, but it’s possible to overdo it. “If Instagram is your vice, that’s like chocolate cookies.”

Replacing chocolate cookies with ice cream may defeat the purpose of a diet, however. In the absence of social media, the authors of the new study note, subjects spent more time playing video games and shopping online.

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