{"id":190025,"date":"2025-10-10T08:28:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T08:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/190025\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T08:28:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T08:28:11","slug":"people-who-use-x-between-two-times-found-to-have-poor-mental-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/190025\/","title":{"rendered":"People who use X between two times found to have poor mental health"},"content":{"rendered":"

Using social media at specific times has been linked to higher rates of poor mental health, depression and anxiety<\/p>\n

06:13, 10 Oct 2025Updated 08:12, 10 Oct 2025<\/p>\n

\"AA woman using social media on her phone(Image: Guido Mieth)<\/p>\n

People who post on social media overnight are more likely to have poor mental wellbeing, a new study suggests. Overnight users are also more likely to report symptoms of depression and anxiety, researchers found. Experts said that most studies on mental wellbeing and social media have concentrated on frequency of social media use.<\/p>\n

They wanted to assess whether timing plays a role. As a result they took to platform X, formerly known as Twitter<\/a>, 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 England \u2013 the Children of the 90s study, also known as the Avon Longitudinal Study of Children and Parents. 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 \u2013 before the site changed its name to X. The study found that people who, on average, tweeted through the night from 11pm to 5am appeared to have \u201cmeaningfully worse mental wellbeing than those who tweeted during the daytime\u201d.<\/p>\n

The authors, led by academics at the University of Bristol, said that tweeting overnight explained almost two per cent 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 \u201ccould displace sleep\u201d as people stay awake to use it. They added that posting and messaging at night could lead to \u201ccognitive arousal\u201d, and said that blue light from smartphones could \u201cinhibit the production of the hormone melatonin\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll these factors may combine to delay sleep onset, and lead to worse sleep quality and quantity, they wrote in the journal Scientific Reports. Improved sleep-related outcomes are in turn associated with better mental health.\u201d<\/p>\n

Daniel Joinson, doctoral researcher at the University of Bristol and lead author of the paper, said: \u201cWhilst social media is often treated like a monolith, its impact on mental health will depend on the exact behaviours the user performs and the experiences they have on these platforms.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur paper highlights the potential harm of a very specific behaviour: nighttime content posting. Research like ours could help inform interventions or legislation that aim to deter harmful social media use, whilst enabling beneficial behaviours or experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elon Musk acquired the company in autumn 2022 and rebranded it as X in summer 2023.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Using social media at specific times has been linked to higher rates of poor mental health, depression and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":190026,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[102,1906,6623,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-190025","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-mentalhealth","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190025\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}