Instagram users are scrolling out of habit not addiction, study finds

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Almost half of teenagers in Britain say they feel addicted to social media

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Constantly find yourself doomscrolling on social media? You may just be doing so out of habit, not addiction.

That’s according to research conducted on 1,204 US adults, which found excessive social media use was not linked to symptoms associated with addiction like cravings, withdrawal symptoms, and continuing use despite negative consequences.

But psychologists highlighted that social media does correlate with negative consequences such as poor body image, anxiety, depression and low self-esteem.

“To label something as an addiction, it needs to impair the functionality of our day-to-day lives,” chartered psychologist Dr Audrey Tang told The Independent.

“However, if we have normalised behaviours like checking our phone, responding immediately to notifications, or having notifications on at all, we are less likely to see these behaviours as an impairment.”

To find out if we are truly addicted, Ian Anderson from the California Institute of Technology and Wendy Wood from the University of Southern California surveyed 380 US Instagram users, of whom half were women and had an average age of 44 years.

Participants described how addicted they felt to Instagram and were assessed for symptoms of addictive use.

The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, revealed that although 18 per cent of participants at least somewhat agreed that they were addicted to Instagram – with 5 per cent substantially agreeing – only 2 per cent displayed symptoms indicating addiction.

Researchers then analysed the language used in US news and media outlets between November 2021 and November 2024. They identified 4,383 articles mentioning the phrase “social media addiction” and 50 mentioning the phrase “social media habit”. This suggests that frequent social media use tends to be described as an addiction, which they argue influences how users perceive their own social media use.

A second sample of 824 US adult Instagram users was asked to frame their social media use as an addiction. They found participants then associated their use with lower feelings of control over their Instagram use and assigned higher levels of blame to both themselves and the platform for their excessive use. Study authors suggest we should use the term addiction more selectively in relation to social media.

Despite this, recent data suggests social media addiction is on the rise, with almost half (48 per cent) of teenagers in Britain saying they feel addicted to social media.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation (WHO) found a “sharp rise” in problematic social media use in 280,000 young people in Canada, central Asia and Europe.

Dr Tang reflected on an example of a child waking up in the middle of the night to use social media and suggested that these habits should be called an addiction because it “isn’t a healthy behaviour”.

Dr David Harley, chartered member of the British Psychological Society and co-chair of its cyberpsychology section, argued that a “habit” can still be detrimental, especially “unconscious habits”.

He suggested calling excessive social media use an addiction places the blame on the person, claiming social media companies design these apps to “make money out of your attention”.

“These habits are honed by the technologies, so they're not just habits that are occurring naturally, they're conditioned habits,” he told The Independent.

Meta has been contacted for comment.

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