When Kyle Palmberg set out to design a research study as the capstone project for his psychology major at St. Mary’s University of Minnesota in Winona, he knew he wanted his focus to be topical and relevant to college students.
His initial brainstorming centered around the mental health impact of poor sleep quality.
“I wanted to look at college students specifically, to see the different ways that sleep quality can be harmed and how that can impact your mental health,” he said. As he reviewed the scientific literature, one variable kept appearing. “The topic that kept coming up was social media overuse,” he said. “It is such an important thing to my target demographic of college students.”
Palmberg, 22, grew up surrounded by social media. He’d heard plenty of warnings about the downsides of spending too much time online, and he’d seen many of his peers seemingly anchored to their phones, anxious or untethered if they had to put them down for more than a few minutes at a time.
“I think from my perspective as someone who’s been really interested in psychology as an academic discipline, social media addiction is also something I’ve been aware of personally,” Palmberg said. “I can tell within myself when things can become harmful or easy to misuse. I often see the hints of addictive behaviors in peers and coworkers.”
Palmberg found much of the published research on the topic inspiring, particularly a 2003 study on internet gambling addiction.
“They were looking at how internet gambling addiction permeates a person’s behavior,” he said. Palmberg hypothesized that there may be behavioral similarities between people addicted to online gambling and those addicted to social media.
“Social media provides this convenient platform for users to interact with others,” he said. “As users grow addicted, they learn that they can come back to that social platform more and more to get their needs met. The tolerance users have for gratifying that social need grows. Then they have to use social media more and more often to get those benefits.”
The negative impact of a growing dependence on social media is that time spent online takes away from real in-person interactions and reduces the time a person has available for basic personal care needs, like sleep and exercise, Palmberg said. This can ultimately have a negative impact on mental health.
“As a person builds a high tolerance for the use of social media it causes internal and external conflict,” he said. “You know it is wrong but you continue to use it. You relapse and struggle to stop using it.” Palmberg said that social media use can be a form of “mood modification. When a person is feeling down or anxious they can turn to it and feel better at least for a moment. They get a sense of withdrawal if they stop using it. Because of this negative side effect, it causes that relapse.”
Palmberg decided he wanted to survey college students about their social media use and devise a study that looked at connections between the different motivations for that use and potential for addictive behaviors. He ran his idea by his academic advisor, Molly O’Connor, associate professor of psychology at Saint Mary’s, who was intrigued by his topic’s clear connections to student life.
“We often notice social media addiction with our student population,” O’Connor said. She knew that Palmberg wouldn’t have a hard time recruiting study participants, because young people have first-hand experience and interest in the topic. “He’s looking at college students who are particularly vulnerable to that addiction. They are tuned into it and they are using it for coursework, socialization, entertainment, self-documentation.”
O’Connor said she and her colleagues at the university see signs of this addiction among many of their students.
“They’ll be on their phones during class when they are supposed to pay attention,” she said. “They can’t help themselves from checking when a notification comes through. They say they had trouble sleeping and you’ll ask questions about why and they’ll say they were scrolling on their phone before they went to bed and just couldn’t fall asleep.”
The entertainment-addiction connection
Once his study was given the go-ahead by his advisor and approved by the university for human-subjects research, Palmberg had two months to recruit participants.
To gather his research subjects, he visited classes and gave a short speech. Afterward, students were given an opportunity to sign up and provide their emails. Palmberg recruited 86 participants this way, and each was asked to fill out an anonymous survey about their social media habits.
Palmberg explained that the main framework of his study was to gain a deeper understanding of why college students use social media and the circumstances when it can become addictive and harmful to their mental health and well-being. He also hypothesized that perceived sleep quality issues would be connected to social media addiction.
After collecting the surveys, Palmberg said, “We essentially threw the data into a big spreadsheet. We worked with it, played with it, analyzed it.” He explained that his analysis focused on motivations for social media use, “including building social connections and self-documentation.”
What Palmberg discovered was that his subjects’ most popular motivation for social media use was for entertainment. While some participants listed other motivations, he said the most “statistically significant” motivation was entertainment.
“Not only was entertainment the most highly endorsed reason to use social media in the study,” Palmberg said, “for college students it was the only motivation we analyzed that was statistically connected to social media addiction and perceived stress. The entertainment motivation was also related to poor sleep quality.”
He found connections between a reliance on social media for entertainment and addictive behaviors, like an inability to shut down apps or put a phone away for an extended period of time. “If a person is using social media for entertainment, they are more likely to be addicted to social media than someone who is not using it for entertainment,” Palmberg said.
The structures of popular social media platforms reinforce addictive behaviors, he said. “Current trends in social media lean more toward entertainment platforms like TikTok or Instagram. People are going on there just to pass time,” Palmberg said. These brief and repetitive formats encourage addiction, he said, because the dopamine high they create is short-lived, causing users to keep visiting to get those fleetingly positive feelings.
O’Connor supports Palmberg’s conclusions. A reliance on social media platforms for entertainment encourages addiction, she said. This is backed up by student behavior.
“My big takeaway was the interest in the entertainment variable was the key predictor of addiction. It’s not necessarily the students that are using it to communicate with each other, but the ones that say, ‘I need to kill time between classes,’ or, ‘I’m bored before bed,’ or, ‘I am trying to relieve stress after working on homework.’” The addictive aspect comes in, O’Connor said, “because users want to be entertained more and more. They are constantly looking for the next thing to talk about with their friends.”
Palmberg said he believes that not all social media use among college students has to be addictive. “It is important for people to view social media as not only something that can be harmful but also something that can be used as a tool. I like to emphasize with my study that it’s not all negative. It is more of an emphasis on moderation. It is possible to use social media responsibly. But just like almost anything, it can be addictive.”
An emphasis on digital well-being
Twice a year, in an effort to get out ahead of digital addiction, students at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter are encouraged to take a deeper look at their social media use and its impact on their mental health. Charlie Potts, the college’s interim dean of students, heads the effort: It’s a clear match with his job and his research interests.
During the semiannual event, known as “Digital Well-Being Week,” Gustavus students learn about the potentially negative impact of social media overuse — as well as strategies for expanding their social networks without the help of technology.
Potts said that event has been held four times so far, and students now tell him they anticipate it.
“We’ve gotten to the point where we get comments from students saying, ‘It’s that time again,’” he said. Students say they appreciate the information and activities associated with Digital Well-Being Week, Potts continued, and they look forward to a week focused on spending less time with their phones.
“They remember that we put baskets on every table in the dining hall with a little card encouraging them to leave their phones there and instead focus on conversations with others,” he added. “We even include a card in the basket with conversation starters. Students are excited about it. They know the drill. It is something they like to do that feels good.”
Potts’ own academic research has focused on mental health and belonging. Each fall, he also heads up a campus-wide student survey focused on digital well-being and how to balance phone use with other aspects of mental and physical health.
In the survey, Potts said, “We ask students, ‘How much time do you spend every day on social media? How does it make you feel?’ Students are blown away when they see the number of hours that the average Gustie spends online. The vast majority are in the 4-7 hours a day on their phone range.”
The survey, which uses a motivational style of interviewing to help participants get at the root of why altering their social media behaviors may be valuable to their overall health and well-being, focuses on small changes that might reduce participants’ reliance on technology in favor of face-to-face interaction.
“We do a lot of conversations with students about strategies they could use,” Potts said. “Things like plugging your phone in across the room while you sleep, leaving it behind while you go to work out at the rec center, subtle changes like that. We also talk about mental health and mindfulness and how…you discern your values about what you are consuming and how that might affect you.”
Though Potts said he has encountered some resistance from students (“You roll with that and help them understand the value of that and think about how they are going to make that change,” he said), he’s also heard a lot of positive student feedback about his survey — and the twice-yearly focus on digital well-being.
“What we found with our students is they realize deep down that their relationship with their phones and social media was not having a positive impact on their life,” Potts said. “They knew change would be good but they didn’t know how to make change or who to talk to about that or what tools were at their disposal. These options help them understand how to do that.”
Andy Steiner
Andy Steiner is a Twin Cities-based writer and editor. Before becoming a full-time freelancer, she worked as senior editor at Utne Reader and editor of the Minnesota Women’s Press. Email her at asteiner@minnpost.com.
