Okay, that is both a great starter for a joke and a fine example of clickbait. But this post does answer the question because, according to a new study, young women who took a social media break for as little as one week had a significant boost in self-esteem and body image—particularly those most vulnerable to thin-ideal internalization.

In short:

• Young women were asked to not use social media for one week or continue normal use

• Taking a break from social media caused improved self-esteem and body satisfaction.

• More benefit to body image was seen in those with high thin ideal internalization.

From the press release:

“The statistician inside me was excited — we don’t often see effect sizes this large in my area of psychology research because human behaviour is complicated and there’s lots of variability,” says Psychology Professor Jennifer Mills, co-author of the paper. “We hope this study can be used to help protect young people and influence social media companies to give users more agency in how they interact with these platforms.”

The paper, out this week in the journal Body Image, is thought to be the first to look specifically at social-media breaks and body image. Mills, whose lab has been on the forefront of this kind of research, collaborated on the paper with graduate researcher Lindsay Samson and undergraduate Olivia Smith, both students at York. They expected that there might be recruitment challenges, but it turns out there was enthusiasm for taking a social media pause among the 66 first-year female undergraduates who participated. Half were instructed to continue their social media as per usual, while the other half were given instructions to refrain from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok and other social media use for one week. They conducted baseline surveys before the experiment, and tested the participants again after the week was over.

“There’s natural variability in how people feel about their bodies and about themselves in general, so we took that into account statistically, and even after that there were still significant differences between the groups after one week,” says Mills, who is also the director of clinical training for the graduate psychology program.

The differences in the social media landscape are remarkable compared to when Mills started researching eating disorders and the effects of media, like magazines aimed at women.

“Back then, you could only spend so many minutes or hours looking at fashion and beauty magazines and they only came out once a month. There was a finite amount of content that you would be exposed to. With social media it’s infinite. It’s always new and novel, which triggers our brain’s reward system that makes us want more and more of something.”

Mills says the improvements found in this study might be explained both by women spending far less time engaging in behaviours known to have a detrimental effect, such as comparisons with others, but they may have also replaced social media with healthier behaviours.

“If we’re spending more time in real life, socializing with friends, getting sleep, getting outdoors, getting exercise, there could be secondary behaviours that fill the void left by social media. Future research will try to disentangle that.”

Abstract of the study:

This study experimentally tested the effects of taking a one-week break from social media (SM) on body image and self-esteem among young women. Female undergraduate students (N = 66) were randomly assigned to either take a one-week break from SM or continue their normal use (control condition). State self-esteem and body satisfaction were measured at baseline (Time 1) and one week later (Time 2). As predicted, participants in the break condition reported higher body satisfaction and higher state self-esteem (total, performance, social, and appearance domains) at Time 2 than did those in the control condition, controlling for Time 1 scores. The benefits of taking a break from SM on body satisfaction were especially pronounced for women with higher baseline levels of thin-ideal internalization. The findings demonstrate the short-term benefits of taking a break from SM for one week on self-esteem and body image among young women.