Oxford University has shown that access to and use of the internet can have a positive impact on mental health.
We are so afraid of the Internet that if what they say is true, we will never go online again. Many people claim that digital spaces can make us depressed, anxious, and even weaken us a little. It lowers our self-esteem, makes us lazy, increases our individualism, and makes us biased. The constant brightness of the phone screen disturbs our sleeping habits, destroys our attention, and scrolling ultimately makes us feel worse. Our children are particularly vulnerable to its harmful effects, as digital devices can cause them to have a whole new form of addiction. But is all this true?
A new, comprehensive study from the University of Oxford, spanning 16 years, 168 countries and 2.4 million people over the age of 15, suggests that in some countries and populations, internet use may be positively linked to mental health and happiness: being more purposeful can make us more content, and in fact, it can increase social well-being. So the study, published last month in the journal Technology, Mind and Behavior, offers some contrast to the rhetoric about the negative effects of digital media.
“I was surprised by how consistent my findings were, which is that people who have access to the Internet are healthier than those who don’t,” says Matti Faur, a psychology researcher at Tilburg University. Fore co-authored the study with Andrew Przybylski, a psychologist at the University of Oxford who has studied the effects of social media and video games on mental health. The researchers stress that their results do not indicate that the Internet makes people feel better, but rather that the two things are loosely related.
To create the study, Fiore and Przybylski used Gallup World Poll data collected between 2006 and 2022 on individuals’ internet access and whether they had used the internet in the previous week. Eight measures of self-reported well-being were used. However, it should also be noted that those with internet access are already expected to have more resources, freedom, and social support than their peers, which actually leads to higher well-being and makes them happier. However, to confirm their findings, the researchers also looked at a number of factors that might influence internet use and well-being, such as income level, employment status, education level, and health problems, which were also collected from Gallup data.
The only notable place where researchers found a negative relationship between internet use and well-being was among young women aged 15 to 24, and those links were specific to community well-being. Young women who reported using the internet in the previous week were, on average, less satisfied with where they lived than those who did not use the internet.
