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New Research Says This Method Significantly Improves Body Image In Young People – But Tough To Follow

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During adolescence, individuals are at a heightened risk of developing body image concerns, eating disorders, and mental health disorders.

A study published by the American Psychological Association found that young people’ self-perceptions regarding their weight and physical appearance improved significantly when they cut their social media use by half for a few weeks.

Six to eight hours a day is the typical amount of time that young people spend in front of devices. People who use social media can see hundreds or even thousands of photos and images every day, including those of celebrities and fashion or fitness models. This is known to cause people to internalize beauty standards that almost no one can reach, which makes them feel worse about their weight and shape.

Lead author Gary Goldfield says that most of the psychological research on social media, body image, and mental health is correlational, so it is not clear if people with body image and mental health problems spend more time on social media or if using social media makes body image and mental health problems worse.

Goldfield and his colleagues previously performed pilot research with 38 undergraduate students who had increased levels of anxiety and/or depression to better understand the causal impacts of limiting social media usage on body image. Some of the people in the study were given a daily restriction of 60 minutes to spend on social media, while others were given no such limits at all. After three weeks, individuals with restricted usage exhibited improvements in how they felt about their overall look (but not their weight) compared to those with unrestricted access. But because the sample size was so small, the researchers couldn’t do a good analysis of the effect of gender.

The present research, conducted with 220 college students aged 17 to 25, included 76% female participants, 23% male participants, and 1% other participants. It was published in the journal Psychology of Popular Media. Participants had to be frequent users of social media (at least two hours per day on their phones) and show signs of sadness or anxiety to be eligible.

During the first week of the experiment, all of the people who took part were told to use their social media as usual. Using a screentime monitoring tool from which users submitted a daily screenshot, social media usage was assessed. Half of the participants were told to limit their usage of social media to no more than 60 minutes per day after the first week. Participants were asked a series of comments at the beginning of the experiment concerning their general appearance (e.g., “I’m pretty happy about the way I look”) and weight (e.g., “I am satisfied with my weight”) on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being “always” At the conclusion of the trial, participants answered a similar questionnaire.

The individuals who were told to limit their social media usage did so for the next three weeks, cutting it by about 50% to an average of 78 minutes per day as opposed to the control group, which averaged 188 minutes per day.

After the three-week intervention, those who cut down on social media users felt much better about their overall look and body weight than the control group, which had no significant change. The effects did not seem to change based on gender.

Reduced social media usage resulted in substantial gains in appearance and weight esteem among troubled teenagers with high social media use, according to Goldfield’s four-week study.

“Reducing social media use is a feasible method of producing a short-term positive effect on body image among a vulnerable population of users and should be evaluated as a potential component in the treatment of body-image-related disturbances.”

Although the present research served as a proof-of-concept, Goldfield and his colleagues are now working on a bigger study to see if social media usage can be reduced for longer periods of time and whether doing so might have even more positive psychological effects.

Image Credit: Getty

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