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What Your Browsing History Says About Your Mental Health
How do you choose to spend your time online?
The typical internet user now spends over 6.5 hours a day online, and more than half of US teens say they spend almost 5 hours a day just on social media.
You could interpret this as a problem in itself, since our internet usage may be taking up time that we used to spend on other healthy activities like meeting friends in person and going for walks.
But what really determines the quality of our online time is how we use the internet. If we spend our time watching videos that bring us joy and reading articles that are intellectually stimulating, that doesn’t seem so bad. If we’re mostly tracking global wars, going down conspiracy theory rabbit holes, or posting angry comments, we’re probably not feeling happy and fulfilled when bedtime rolls around each night.
Research published just last month (November, 2024) has looked into how our internet usage behaviors interact with our mental health. What they found is a perfect real-life illustration of the phrase “vicious circle”.
The two-way street between our mood and the internet
In a recently published study, researchers recruited 700+ participants in the US and UK, and asked them to browse the…
