Smartphones & social media

Thousands of studies link heavier or more compulsive smartphone and social media use to more depression and anxiety, shorter sleep and lower wellbeing, especially in adolescents. Pooled, the associations are consistent but small, and researchers disagree in public about how much is cause and how much is reverse causation or shared risk factors. The stronger evidence is narrower: phone use late in the evening reliably shortens sleep, and randomised trials that have people cut back or deactivate accounts for a few weeks find small improvements in mood. How you use it — passive scrolling, comparison, displaced sleep — appears to matter more than raw hours.

Reviewed 2026-10-02

Official sources

How this list was built

We searched Europe PMC for English-language papers published since 2012 whose title contains “problematic smartphone use” or “smartphone addiction” or “problematic social media use” or “social media use” or “social media abstinence” or “screen time”, kept meta-analyses, systematic reviews, trials and observational studies, because a diet or exposure like this cannot be randomised for long and its outcome evidence lives in cohorts, then ranked them by study design first, then recency and citations. Retracted papers are removed.

Open a paper to read its abstract and ask for an AI brief of what it found.