Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

The executive summary highlights:

* Personal wellbeing drops, on average, as children move from primary into secondary school, and continues to drop as children move through secondary school.

* We find a graded relationship between family income and all three outcomes through adolescence: young people’s mental and emotional health scores are worse the lower down their family is on the income scale

*Engaging in physical activity was found to be more important for boys’ mental and emotional health in early adolescence than girls’, with a graded relationship between frequency of exercise and scores on all three outcomes for 14-year-old boys; at age 17, we find a graded relationship with frequency of exercise in both girls and boys. Heavy social media use is associated with worse scores on all outcomes in girls age 14 and 17, but only worse well being for boys at age 14.

Etc...

[1]https://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/EPI-PT_Young-p...

Does it? I've been using social media extensively for almost 30 years now (and now building social platforms for nearly a decade), and a lot of the biggest opportunities I've gotten in my life/career have come from social media. Whatever anxiety it can cause on a day-to-day basis, I feel like you more than make back in various benefits over the long term.

Kind of estranged my family to do it, but as soon as I was in my new city I had a great girlfriend, and my cost of living was much lower, I was much happier.

The old journey kind of took me on a personal discovery. You shouldn't worry about other people criticizing your choices because they aren't going to really affect them, and even if they are they're adults they can sort something else out.

In this new city I would notice even though technically the population was large, the communities were very tight-knit. If you're rude to the local bartender her dad might have a word with you. Contrast it to the internet, I spoke to a girl who had to stop using dating apps because guys would just lead with calling her nasty and fat. In real life if you do that there can be immediate consequences to that behavior.

Imagine if you will you were at a bar, and the Packers are playing the raiders or something, if you start yelling at random people that raiders fans are disgusting and horrible you can expect to be removed, and banned from returning to that bar. ( Or they might agree with you and buy you a beer who knows).

On twitter, Reddit Facebook whatever that doesn't really exist. You can say ridiculously nasty mean things to everyone and nothing's going to happen to you. I had to stop using social media because I would become distraught over some of the stuff I read, almost all the bigotry I experienced was entirely online.

Everyone has a right to spend their time in their energy the way they choose, but since I don't want to be called slurs I don't use social media. I've posted here a ton but back in 2019 I went completely offline and I had amazing partners, made tons of friends, traveled. I even increased my income by no small amount, I used that time I was spending making the Zuckerbergs of the world rich into improving myself.

but if I've learned one thing in my life, it's that self-improvement is very hard, I'm the only person who can put down the second donut. it's a lot easier to go on Reddit and then complain about how societies out to get you, are to go on Twitter and just spread your own, really just self-hatred to other people hoping to dissipate it. Yet you can't, spreading hate doesn't take it out of you, if anything you're just going to get more hate back and then it builds up like a fuel.

Most angry online folks, if you took away their social media and slowly reintroduced them to community, maybe a nice bowling league or something, within a year they'd be so much happier.