How concerned should you be about screen time?

Wait, stop scrolling! How long have you been on the phone today? Are social networks rotting your brain? We ask questions like these all the time, but how concerned should you be about screen time?

There are literally hundreds of thousands of studies looking at screen time, and many of them have found links between screen use and a wide variety of health problems, including depression, anxiety, lack of sleep, obesity, diabetes, and even suicide. This all sounds pretty bad.

There’s only one question: are the screens themselves causing these problems, or is poor health leading to increased screen time? Or could there even be a third unknown factor influencing both?

The vast majority of these studies can’t tell you, because they simply show a correlation between screen time and health. Identifying causality – the true impact of screen time – is much more difficult.

To get to the bottom of this, researchers conduct meta-analyses bringing together hundreds of high-quality studies using more advanced statistical techniques. In doing so, much of the evil 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, looked at a large dataset of questionnaires given to adolescents, allowing them to compare the effects of more than 20,000 different factors on participants’ mental health.

Analyzing the numbers, they found that only 0.4 percent of adolescents’ well-being was linked to screen use, a level of negative effect comparable to that of eating potatoes. In comparison, being bullied was associated with more than four times this negative affect, while getting enough sleep and eating a good breakfast were associated with much greater positive effects.

So, is screen time good? Well, again, let’s not be in such a hurry. Even if the links between screen time and mental health are put in context with other factors, they are only correlations. People’s lives are complicated, and it’s difficult to extract causality from messy data.

One way to sort through the noise might be to ask what we actually mean by screen time. Watching TV, browsing social media on your phone, playing video games, reading an e-book, or listening to a science journalist talk about screen time all involve looking at a screen, but could 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 looking at a screen. And to make matters worse, this data is often self-reported, which we know makes it less likely to be accurate. (Come on, we all lie about this.)

Even though we only focus on social media, it encompasses so much. Discussing politics on X until 3 a.m. and messaging your friends on WhatsApp are both examples of using social media, but do they have the same effect? A meta-analysis published in 2024 in the journal SMS – Mental health attempted to understand this, finding small positive correlations between well-being and using social media to communicate or having lots of social media-based friends. The study also found small negative correlations with comparing yourself to others on social media or with problematic social media use – what we might call “being addicted” to social media. None of this seems particularly surprising, does it?

So where does this leave us? Given the potential risk of harm, we could adopt the precautionary principle, particularly when it comes to children. We could significantly restrict their screen time or even introduce bans on certain types of technology use, such as social media, as the UK and Australian governments are doing.

But I worry that this will cause us to miss out on the benefits of screen time: information, social connection, entertainment and much more. What the data seems to tell us, as best we can make out through all the noise, is that on average – at the population level – the positive and negative effects of screens are small. That’s not to say that some people aren’t experiencing much greater harm – those problem users I talked about earlier – and we need to understand a lot more to help them.

Considering all of this, how concerned should you be about screen time? The answer is complex and based on constantly evolving research. If you find that screens are significantly interfering with your life, changing your behavior may be helpful, as may seeking medical advice. For most of us, though, screen use shouldn’t be at the top of your list of concerns — and certainly not as important as the headlines might lead you to believe.