You might have heard a lot of people guiding the youngsters about the harmful effects of social media usage and how utterly damaging it is for the mental health of users. But all of these statements never met research and study.

The new experimental study of Penn State has changed these statements to more than just ‘statements,’ as the experiment directly links more social media use to worse emotional states and vice versa.

The Experiment Focused On The Use Of Facebook, Instagram, and SnapChat:

The experiment was conducted in a way that One hundred and forty-three school students were asked to do one of the two things mentioned below:

Students were asked to either limit their use of social media to either 10 minutes per app a day.

Or either uses the applications normally like they used to do.

Also read: Facebook Is Determined To Fight Against Child Exploitation!

The students were experimented and monitored up to three weeks. The experimented time period comprised of the weekly session on a variety of standard tests for depression, social support and much more. 

The social media usage; the essence of the experiment, was monitored by the iOS battery use screen, which shows app use.

The Experiment Showed Some Alarming Results Of Social Media Usage: 

source: Science News for Students

As the title of the topic depicts, the results were surely alarming for people like us that access social media and its applications, on a loop.

Here’s what the study said, which was later published in the latest Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology:

“The limited use group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks compared to the control group. Both groups showed significant decreases in anxiety and fear of missing out over baseline, suggesting a benefit of increased self-monitoring.

Our findings strongly suggest that limiting social media use to approximately 30 minutes per day may lead to significant improvement in well-being.”

Now that the results are in front of us, we know what we should have our hold on.

Also if you are done with depressing experiments, here’s a fun experiment you can do with designing.