How This Amount of Social Media Time May Be Hurting Teen Mental Health

As parents continue to wonder whether social media is truly harming their kids, research is mounting that it does. Now, a new study suggests the answer may be largely tied to how many hours they log online.

The research, published last month in BMC Medicine and announced by Imperial College London on Monday, found that teens who use social media for more than three hours a day may face higher risks of depression and anxiety.

The new longitudinal study examined the data of over 2,300 adolescents in schools across London over time to better understand how social networking site use relates to mental health outcomes. Researchers specifically examined links between social media use and symptoms of depression and anxiety and whether sleep might explain some of those effects.

What they found was telling. For 11 and 12 year olds, higher levels of social networking site use — specifically, more than three hours per day — were associated with increased depressive and anxiety symptoms by the time those adolescents reached ages 13-15. Which is a problem, considering most teens spend about five hours a day on social media.

But one of the most important findings was that sleep appeared to play a key role in that relationship. In other words, teens who used social media more frequently were more likely to experience sleep disruptions, which were then linked to worsening mental health.

This adds to growing evidence that the issue isn’t solely time spent online, but how social media habits affect aspects of teens’ daily lives like sleep, stress, and emotional wellbeing. Researchers also noted that adolescence is a particularly sensitive developmental period, making teens more vulnerable to the psychological effects of social media use.

“The relationship we see is complex, so it’s not as straightforward as saying that social media use directly causes poor mental health in children, like the well-established direct link between smoking and lung cancer, for example,” said Dr Chen Shen, from the School of Public Health at Imperial and first author of the study, in a press release. “But we see that children who use social media above a certain level when they are in Year 7 [ages 11 and 12] are more likely to develop mental health problems when they reach Years 9 and 10 [ages 13-15], and we believe this is largely due to sustained disruptions to sleep.”

This makes sense, experts say. Late-night scrolling, notifications, and social pressures can all interfere with sleep, which in turn affects mood, emotional regulation, and resilience. And teens are already facing a crisis of sleep deprivation. Their biological clocks naturally shift later during adolescence, making it harder to fall asleep early and easier for social media use to push bedtime even later.

Teens’ Digital Wellbeing Is Getting Worse

And this is nothing new. Two other recent studies have linked problematic social media use — meaning they struggle to control their use and feel compelled to stay online — to higher risks of depression and anxiety.

Separate research released this week by the online safety company Aura suggests that teens’ digital wellbeing may be declining, particularly among older adolescents. According to Aura’s new Digital Wellbeing Score, more than 60% of 16 to 17-year-olds fall into the “low wellbeing” category, compared with fewer than 40% of kids ages 8 to 15.

The score, which ranges from 0 to 100, evaluates device habits and teens’ connection to wellbeing. Those with lower scores reported:

In other words, the same factors highlighted in the Imperial College London study (especially concerning sleep and emotional health) are showing up again in real-world data.

Even more concerning is that digital wellbeing appears to worsen with age, suggesting that teens may struggle more as their online lives expand and social pressures increase.

Takeaway for Parents

Taken together, the BMC Medicine study and Aura’s data offer a more nuanced picture of teens and technology, telling us:

Rather than focusing only on time limits, experts increasingly suggest that parents look at how social media is affecting their child’s daily life. Some signs that digital habits may be impacting wellbeing include:

Bottom line: Social media isn’t going away, but helping teens build healthier digital habits may be more important than ever.