Study of 1,000+ People Shows When Social Media is Bad for Your Health
Social networks impair recovery by 40% if you’re stressed or overworked
A new Welltory study based on physiological measurements taken by 1,000+ research participants shows that social media impairs recovery by 40% for people who are stressed, tired or overworked. These results hold true even for people who lead very healthy lifestyles and are in great shape overall. To read the full research paper click here
Previous research is controversial
If you’ve been wondering how the time you spend scrolling through your newsfeed affects you, you’re not alone. With 81% of US Americans plugged into social media, research into how these networks affect our mental and physical well-being has turned into a priority for the scientific community.
So what does social media do to our health and brain? For now, the answer is an unequivocal “it depends”.
When it comes to health, social media is a mixed bag
A study from Pew Research center, for example, has found that social media can both cause and reduce stress. Similarly, researchers from the University of California have found that social media can cause both positive and negative emotions. Results are often muddied by complicating factors like personality traits, pre-existing illnesses, and lifestyle differences.
The same applies to recovery: scrolling through the newsfeed can affect your ability to recover, but only in some cases.
Welltory’s researchers decided to put an and to controversy and examined the data to let you know when you can keep scrolling safely, and when it’s time to log off.
Social media impacts recovery
The Welltory team used heart rate variability data collected from the Welltory app in order to analyze the effects of social media use on recovery parameters for a total of 1,419 people (ages 19–60).
In order to limit study participants to people who were stressed, tired, or overworked on the observation day, researchers selected users whose rMSSD values on the morning of the experiment date were at least 20% lower than their average.
Then, they separated the group into people who used social media for less than 10 minutes on the day of observation and people who used social media for 30–90 minutes on the day of observation in order to see how the difference in social media use affected changes in their rMSSD values the next morning.
We combined rMSSD data with data transmitted to the app through RescueTime, a productivity tracker that records the amount of time users spend on social media, to analyze how social media use affects changes in rMSSD.
People who spend less than 10 minutes on social media when they are stressed recover 40% better than those who use social media for 30–90 minutes on days they are stressed, tired, or overworked.
Social media kills recovery if you’re stressed or overworked
These findings hold true regardless of people’s lifestyle, habits, and overall health. People who lead healthy lifestyles (regular exercise, healthy diet, etc.) were also negatively impacted by longer social media use.
“We definitely expected excessive social media use to have some impact on recovery,” says Marina Kovaleva, head of R&D at Welltory , “But what we didn’t expect is for people who lead very healthy lifestyles to be just as affected by social media use on days their physiological performance is below their average.”
If your scores look good, you can keep scrolling guilt-free
Welltory researchers also created control groups to test how people who weren’t tired or stressed responded to social media use. For this group, they selected users whose rMSSD values on the morning of the experiment were within their average range.
Like with the experimental group, the control group was split up into people who used social media for less than 10 minutes and people who used social media for 30–90 minutes on the day of the experiment in order to test the effects of social media use.
The results showed that social media use had no impact on recovery for users who weren’t already stressed, tired, or overworked.
Learning more about your body is key
The results suggest that being in tune with your body is the best way to make healthy decisions about social media use, and taking physiological measurements with an app like Welltory can certainly help.
If you see that your body is feeling a bit under the weather (low energy levels or high stress, for example), it’s time to close your messenger apps and focus on recovery by going for a walk or getting a massage instead.
To read the full research paper click here
What is Welltory?
Welltory is a data-driven wellness app that measures heart rate variability through the phone camera and calculates Performance, Stress, and Energy levels.
The app tracks heartbeat by monitoring changes in the blood vessels of a user’s index finger with a phone camera, then runs the data through heart rate variability algorithms in order to calculate the results.
The app uses proprietary algorithms to calculate people’s daily stress, energy, and performance scores, but also tracks well-known heart rate variability parameters that have been used by researchers by decades to assess changes in heart function, nervous system, and overall health.
Welltory also lets users plug in 70+ apps and gadgets and track how factors like sleep, productivity, steps, and even the weather affect their health scores.
If you haven’t tried Welltory yet, it’s simple — just download our free app here to get started.
