If I spent less time on social media would improve my body image.
Good question.
More than 90% of adolescents spend 3 hours a day or more on social media.
An adolescent is a vulnerable period for the development of body image issues.
So to get a better understanding of these relationship ups,
we conducted an experiment.
We assigned 220 youth to one of two groups,
an intervention group that was required to reduce social media
to one hour per day, or a control group
that had no restrictions on social media use.
We measured social media use every day objectively by the participants sending us
screenshots with screen trackers embedded in their social media use.
We measured them for seven days to get a stable measure of social media use,
and participants filled out questionnaires online about their body image
during that baseline period before the intervention and four weeks later,
results showed that the intervention group showed significant improvements
in body image, most notably appearance, esteem and weight esteem.
Whereas the control group showed no change in body image.
And this discovery is important as results would suggest
that reducing social media to about one hour a day may play an important
component in the treatment and prevention of body image issues in youth.
In a nutshell, when it comes to social media, use less is more.