How worried should you be about screentime?

Wait, stop scrolling! How long did you talk on the phone today? Is social media eating away at your brain? We get questions like this all the time, but how concerned should you be about screen time?

There are literally hundreds of thousands of studies on screen time, and many have found links between screen time and a huge variety of health problems, including depression, anxiety, poor sleep, obesity, diabetes, and even suicide. This all sounds pretty bad.

There's just one question: are screens themselves causing these problems, or is poor health leading to more screen time? Or maybe there is an unknown third factor influencing both?

The vast majority of these studies can't tell you that because they just show a correlation between screen time and health. Determining cause and effect (the actual impact of screen time) is much more difficult.

To get to the bottom of this, researchers are conducting a meta-analysis that combines hundreds of high-quality studies using more advanced statistical methods. In doing so, much of the harm seems to disappear.

My favorite meta-analysis (yes, of course I have a favorite meta-analysis) was carried out in 2019. Researchers Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski, both then at the University of Oxford, examined a huge data set of questionnaires given to teenagers, allowing them to compare the impact of more than 20,000 different factors on participants' mental health.

When they crunched the numbers, they found that only 0.4 percent of teens' well-being was attributable to screen time, a level of negative impact comparable to eating potatoes. In comparison, bullying was associated with more than four times the negative affect, while getting enough sleep and a good breakfast were associated with much greater positive affect.

So, is screen time okay? Well, once again, let's not be in such a hurry. Although the link between screen time and mental health is considered in the context of other factors, it is only a correlation. People's lives are messy, and discerning cause and effect from jumbled data is difficult.

One way to make sense of this noise is to ask what we actually mean by screen time. Watching TV, scrolling through social media on your phone, playing video games, reading an e-book, or listening to a science journalist talk about screen time all involve staring at a screen, but can we expect them all to have the same impact on our health?

Many studies don't take a particularly sophisticated approach to this question, simply counting the number of hours spent in front of a screen. And to make matters worse, these data are often self-reported, which we know makes them less likely to be accurate. (Come on, we all lie about this.)

Even if we focus only on social media, it includes so many things. Arguing about politics on X until 3am and chatting with friends on WhatsApp are examples of social media use, but do they have the same effect? A meta-analysis published in 2024 in the journal SSM – Mental health tried to find out by finding small positive correlations between well-being and using social networks for communication or having a large number of friends on social networks. Small negative correlations were also found with comparing oneself to others on social media or with problematic social media use—what we might call social media “addiction.” None of this sounds particularly surprising, does it?

What then remains for us? Given the potential risk of harm, we might adopt the precautionary principle, especially when children are involved. We could severely limit their screen time or even impose bans on the use of certain types of technology, such as social media, as the UK and Australian governments are doing.

But I worry that this could cause us to miss out on the benefits of screen time—information, social connection, entertainment, and more. What the data seems to tell us, as far as we can discern through all the noise, is that on average—at a population level—the positive and negative effects of screens are small. This doesn't mean there aren't people who are being harmed much more – those problem users I talked about earlier – and we need to understand a lot more to help them.

Given all this, how concerned should you be about screen time? The answer to this question is complex and based on ongoing research. If you find that screens are seriously interfering with your life, you may need to change your behavior and also seek medical help. However, for most of us, screen use shouldn't be high on the list of concerns – and certainly not as high as the headlines might lead you to believe.