When "Time Online" Tells Us Little:  Duration of Social Media Use does not Influence Sleep Disruption or Psychopathology in Adolescents Running title: Sleep, social media use and mental health in adolescents

Morgan Lott; Sophia Koesterer; Eleanor Mackellar; Amanda McCleery; Gerta Bardhoshi; Jonathan M Platt; Bengi Baran

doi:10.17077/pp.006789

Back

When "Time Online" Tells Us Little: Duration of Social Media Use does not Influence Sleep Disruption or Psychopathology in Adolescents Running title: Sleep, social media use and mental health in adolescents

Preprint

Open access

When "Time Online" Tells Us Little: Duration of Social Media Use does not Influence Sleep Disruption or Psychopathology in Adolescents Running title: Sleep, social media use and mental health in adolescents

Morgan Lott, Sophia Koesterer, Eleanor Mackellar, Amanda McCleery, Gerta Bardhoshi, Jonathan M Platt and Bengi Baran

01/13/2026

DOI: 10.17077/pp.006789

Files and links (1)

pdf

Lott_When Time Online Tells Us Little562.66 kBDownload View

Open Access Free to read and download

Abstract

Background: Adolescent mental health problems have risen alongside increasing sleep disruption and widespread social media use (SMU). However, the mechanisms linking these factors remain unclear. This study concurrently examined objectively measured sleep and SMU in relation to psychopathology to test whether SMU moderates the sleep–mental health association and to characterize day-to-day bidirectional relations among sleep, affect, mood, and SMU during the school year. Methods: Eighty-ﬁve adolescents (ages 12–18) completed 14 days of wrist actigraphy, smartphone-based ecological momentary assessments of mood and aGect, and objective SMU duration tracking. Cross-sectional models tested whether SMU moderated associations between sleep and psychopathology, and multilevel daily models examined within-person lagged associations among sleep, SMU, and aGect, controlling for age and sex. False discovery rate correction was applied. Results: Shorter average sleep duration and greater variability in sleep duration between weekdays and weekends were associated with higher psychopathology symptoms, primarily externalizing problems. SMU duration neither moderated nor directly predicted psychopathology or sleep. Within-person analyses showed that longer-than-usual sleep predicted more positive and less negative affect and lower next-day SMU, though these associations did not survive correction for multiple comparisons Conclusions: Sleep disruption showed consistent associations with adolescent psychopathology, whereas the amount of time spent on social media did not. These ﬁndings suggest that duration-based measures of SMU may poorly capture digital risk and highlight the need for more granular, context-sensitive indicators of online behavior in understanding youth mental health.

Sleep

Social Media

adolescent mental health

actigraphy

Social Media Use (SMU)

ecological momentary assessments (EMA)

Details

Title: Subtitle: When "Time Online" Tells Us Little: Duration of Social Media Use does not Influence Sleep Disruption or Psychopathology in Adolescents Running title: Sleep, social media use and mental health in adolescents
Creators: Morgan Lott - University of Iowa
Sophia Koesterer - University of Iowa
Eleanor Mackellar - University of Iowa
Amanda McCleery - University of Iowa, Iowa Neuroscience Institute
Gerta Bardhoshi - University of Iowa, Counselor Education and Supervision
Jonathan M Platt - University of Iowa, Epidemiology
Bengi Baran (Author) - University of Iowa, Psychological and Brain Sciences
Resource Type: Preprint
DOI: 10.17077/pp.006789
Number of pages: 33 pages
Language: English
Date posted: 01/13/2026
Academic Unit: Psychiatry; Epidemiology; Psychological and Brain Sciences; Iowa Neuroscience Institute; Counselor Education and Supervision; Center for Social Science Innovation; Anesthesia; Injury Prevention Research Center
Record Identifier: 9985115470202771

Metrics

60 File views/ downloads

135 Record Views