Heavy social media use is often blamed for rising anxiety among young people.
A recent study confirmed that the heaviest users were far more likely to report anxiety and suicidal thoughts, but it stopped short of proving cause and effect.
The researchers cannot determine whether social media drives anxiety or whether anxiety leads young people to spend more time online.
Jeff Temple and his colleagues analyzed data from 1,066 young adults with an average age of about 20. The individuals were part of a project that had followed them for years.
Those reporting more than six hours of daily use had more than double the odds of anxiety and over three times the odds of thinking about suicide in the past year – compared to those who used it less than an hour.
The team works at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth Houston). Temple is a professor there and ran the analysis.
Not the usual college sample
Most work on this question has leaned on high schoolers or college students, often from the pandemic years, before TikTok took hold. That leaves a wide stretch of young people uncounted.
This sample helped fill that gap. Nearly half, 46 percent, were Hispanic, with Black, white and Asian participants making up much of the rest.
Many were not in a four-year college. Some were working full time, and others were not in school at all.
They were also followed for years. Temple’s team first recruited them in 2018, at an average age of about 12, as part of a middle-school project, then surveyed them once a year.
One question about daily use
The social media questions arrived in the seventh yearly round, in 2025. So the answers describe people in their late teens and early twenties, not children.
Everyone got one plain question about a typical day: how much time on social media, with Twitter/X, Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok named as examples.
Before answering, they were told to open their phone’s own screen-time report and read it, a step meant to make the self-reported hours more accurate.
Answers came in bands, from under an hour up to over six. Only 18 people chose “none,” so that response was folded into the lightest group.
About a third fell in the one-to-three-hour band, and another third in the three-to-six-hour band.
Roughly 17.3 percent, 184 people, were in the heaviest group, over six hours a day, and girls outnumbered boys there.
More hours, higher scores
Anxiety and depression were scored with two standard checklists that ask how often, in the past week, a person felt on edge, slept poorly, or had little appetite.
A separate item, drawn from a psychiatric manual, asked whether they had thought about suicide in the past year.
Anxiety and depression scores rose step by step as daily use increased. Reports of suicidal thinking moved the same way.
The pattern held after the team accounted for sex, race, ethnicity and household income.
Heavy users still scored higher on anxiety and reported more suicidal thinking than the lightest users did.
Depression is the one place the result is less clear.
Symptom scores rose with heavier use, but the odds of crossing into probable depression did not move much, which left anxiety and suicidal thoughts as the clearest signals.
Girls at the heavy end
The link between anxiety and heavy use was stronger for girls than for boys.
Among girls in the heaviest group, the odds of probable anxiety were more than three times those of the lightest users.
Temple offers two everyday explanations.
“When teens are using social media, they’re comparing themselves to others. People only post the good on social media, typically, so they only see this happy life where everything’s perfect, and so we compare ourselves to others,” Temple said.
“It could also be that because they’re spending so much time on social media, they’re not spending time in the real world getting typical prosocial stuff that makes us happy and makes us less anxious.”
What a snapshot cannot show
Temple is careful about the direction. Young people already struggling may turn to social media to cope or escape, he said, in which case poor mental health is driving the heavy use rather than the reverse.
His team acknowledged some limitations of the study. Everything rests on self-report, the data come from one point in time, and the measures of both social media use and suicidal thinking were thin.
Because of that single-timepoint design, the study cannot pull cause from effect.
Heavy use might worsen mental health, or distress might drive the use, with a third factor possibly behind both.
Beyond blaming the phones
The researchers also pointed to a practical use for the findings.
Heavy social media time, they noted, could help flag young people who might benefit from support, in person or online, whether or not the phones are the root of the trouble.
“It’s easy to blame what’s in our face, quite literally – phones. Without studies, it’s just opinion,” Temple said.
“Once we understand the problem and recognize the problem, then we can start answering the who, what, when, where, why, and how.”
He said the findings could help determine whether teens need to spend less time on social media, or whether social media platforms themselves need to become safer and less likely to contribute to poor mental health.
The study is published in the journal Pediatrics Open Science.
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