{"id":208919,"date":"2025-10-13T03:44:18","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T03:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/208919\/"},"modified":"2025-10-13T03:44:18","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T03:44:18","slug":"nighttime-social-media-use-tied-to-mental-health-issues-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/208919\/","title":{"rendered":"Nighttime social media use tied to mental health issues: Study"},"content":{"rendered":"

People who post on social media <\/a>overnight are more likely to have poor mental wellbeing<\/a>, a study suggests.<\/p>\n

Overnight users are also more likely to report symptoms of depression <\/a>and anxiety, researchers found.<\/p>\n

Experts said that most studies on mental wellbeing and social media have concentrated on frequency of social media use. They wanted to assess whether timing plays a role.<\/p>\n

As a result, they took to platform X, formerly known as Twitter, to assess overnight usage, as measured by the time that people posted.<\/p>\n

This was correlated with data from a long-term study tracking the health of people from the west of the U.K. – the Children of the 90s study, also known as the Avon Longitudinal Study of Children and Parents.<\/p>\n

Some 310 people were chosen to be involved in the study based on the timing of their tweets and when they answered questionnaires about their wellbeing.<\/p>\n

Overall researchers examined 18,288 tweets, including retweets, posted between January 2008 and February 2023 – before the site changed its name to X.<\/p>\n

The study found that people who, on average, tweeted through the night from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. appeared to have “meaningfully worse mental wellbeing than those who tweeted during the daytime.”<\/p>\n

The authors, led by academics at the University of Bristol, said that tweeting overnight explained almost 2% of variation in mental wellbeing. They also found a link between overnight tweeting with depression and anxiety, but these were not as strong.<\/p>\n

The team highlighted how nighttime use of social media “could displace sleep” as people stay awake to use it.<\/p>\n

They added that posting and messaging at night could lead to “cognitive arousal,” and said that blue light from smartphones could “inhibit the production of the hormone melatonin.”<\/p>\n

“All these factors may combine to delay sleep onset, and lead to worse sleep quality and quantity, they wrote in the journal Scientific Reports.”<\/p>\n

“Improved sleep-related outcomes are in turn associated with better mental health.”<\/p>\n

Daniel Joinson, doctoral researcher at the University of Bristol and lead author of the paper, said: “While social media is often treated like a monolith, its impact on mental health will depend on the exact behaviors the user performs and the experiences they have on these platforms.”<\/p>\n

“Our paper highlights the potential harm of a very specific behavior: nighttime content posting.”<\/p>\n

“Research like ours could help inform interventions or legislation that aim to deter harmful social media use, whilst enabling beneficial behaviors or experiences.”<\/p>\n

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