According to a study carried out in Finland, a concerning percentage of teenage girls may be addicted to smartphones, which is causing anxiety and mental health issues.

Social media is king

Tracking smartphone usage is never easy. If you asked most people how long they spend on their phones, the responses would often be wildly inaccurate. However, in this new study, researchers asked participants to also send screenshots of their app usage.

“In all previous studies on adolescent social media use and mental health, daily smartphone use has been only self-reported,” says Silja Kosola, from the University of Helsinki, for ZME Science. “In our study, adolescents also sent us screenshots from their own phones depicting social media use from the past week. This objective data proved very valuable: actual smartphone use was higher than adolescents estimated, and we were also able to assess what screen time was composed of.”

The researchers recruited female participants from 49 schools in the metropolitan area of Helsinki, Finland. Overall, 1164 students aged 15-16 chose to participate. The participants were assessed for socioeconomic diversity and came from both public and private high schools across all socioeconomic areas, Kosola says . They focused on girls because both social media anxiety and addiction are more common among them.

Overall, 656 participants supplied smartphone information, and 86% of them also sent screenshot data that could be used. The data shows an average of seven apps being used.

“Social media was by far the most common activity,” the researcher told us. “Study participants spent on average 350 minutes per day on their smartphones and 230 minutes of this was on social media apps. Other apps included internet browsers (median 11 min), entertainment or streaming services (median 6 min), and very little time on education, creativity, gaming and shopping apps. These data were based on the screenshots of the most frequently used apps.”

Smartphone addiction

The average daily smartphone usage was 5.8 hours a day, while the average time spent on social media was 3.9 hours.

The researchers then tried to assess addiction and anxiety. Greater social media usage was linked to higher levels of anxiety, lower mood, more tiredness, and poorer body image. Overall, 17% of teens were possibly addicted to social media and over a third (37%) scored above the cut-off for potential anxiety disorder.

Social media is also causing serious societal problems, Kosola mentions.

“”In Finland, mental health problems are already the leading cause of prolonged absences from work. Social media may also contribute to the number of interruptions and reduced concentration skills reported by young people. These in turn may contribute to study-related exhaustion.”

The researchers also mention that some of the participants had tried to limit their social media activities. However, the apps are simply too addictive, and the appeal is too great.

“In some of the screenshots, we saw that adolescents had tried to limit their use of social media. Some had set a limit of e.g. 45 minutes per day on TikTok – and then data from the same person indicated that they had in fact spent on average three hours per day on TikTok! Clearly these limits are too easy to pass, and the app is too addictive to control.”

“In 2019, a study published in the Lancet defined frequent social media use as three times or more per day. In our study, data on smartphone pick-ups was available for only 74 participants, but the range for pick-ups was 58 to 356 times per day!”

Curbing the problem

The study was carried out in Finland, but similar problems likely exist in many parts of the world, and solving them isn’t easy. Kosola says the first step is to reconsider the age when a child gets their first smartphone. Adolescence is a time of intense brain development and it should be “properly protected,” the researcher says.

Ultimately, however, the solution may be regulation. If smartphones (and social media, in particular) are so addictive, then maybe they should be treated as addictive substances, conclude the researchers.

“The first starting point at schools should be banning smartphones during school days. In homes, smartphones should be left out of bedrooms to insure at least sufficient sleep. Social media has, however, undergone an evolution which has increased its addictive nature. If the companies behind social media sites refuse to increase the safety of their sites, more strict age limits should be considered similar to gambling.”

The study was published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.