Increased social media use linked to anxiety, suicidal ideation among young adults

Teenagers who spent six or more hours a day on social media were twice as likely to experience symptoms of anxiety and three times as likely to report suicidal ideation than those who spent less than one hour on social media each day, according to researchers at UTHealth Houston. The findings were published today in Pediatrics Open Science and led by Jeff Temple, Ph.D., professor and associate dean for clinical research at UTHealth Houston School of Behavioral Health Sciences.

“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,” said Temple, who is the Betty and Rose Pfefferbaum Chair in Child Mass Trauma and Resilience at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston. “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.”

The opposite could also be true—young adults who are already experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression may use social media more as a form of escape, Temple said.

Unlike previous studies, which focused heavily on high school or college students and predated new social media platforms like TikTok, Temple’s team focused on emerging adults who were, on average, 12 years old when the research began.

Temple and his team used data from a group of 1,066 young adults who self-reported their social media use through annual surveys between 2018 and 2025.

Of the group, 8.5% reported using social media less than one hour a day, while more than a third reported using social media between one and three hours each day. Slightly more than 17% reported using social media for six or more hours each day, with girls reporting higher levels of use than boys.

Additionally, the association between symptoms of anxiety and social media use was more pronounced among girls, according to the data.

Depression and anxiety symptoms were assessed using the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression and Generalized Anxiety Disorder scales. The scales ask respondents to self-report how many days in the past week they’ve experienced certain symptoms, such as a poor appetite, trouble sleeping, feeling on edge or trouble relaxing.

Temple said the study confirms what children and families report anecdotally about mental health and social media use.

“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, and determine what we need to do to either make folks look at their smartphones and social media less or make social media higher quality and less likely to contribute to poor mental health.”

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