Offline time can make your teenager happier

We’d all like to be a little happier. The problem is that much of what determines happiness is outside of our control. Some of us are genetically predisposed to see the world through rose-colored glasses, while others have a generally negative outlook. Bad things happen, people can be unkind, and jobs tedious.

But we do have some control over how we spend our leisure time. In a new analysis of 1 million US teens, my co-authors and I looked at how teens were spending their free time and which activities correlated with happiness, and which didn’t.

We wanted to see if changes in the way teens spend their free time might partially explain a startling drop in teens’ happiness after 2012 — and perhaps the decline in adults’ happiness since 2000 as well.

A possible culprit emerges

We analysed data from a nationally representative survey of 8th, 10th and 12th graders conducted annually since 1991.

We found that teens who spent more time seeing their friends in person, exercising, playing sports, attending religious services, reading or even doing homework were happier. However, teens who spent more time on the internet, playing computer games, on social media, texting, using video chat or watching TV were less happy. Teens who spent more than five hours a day online were twice as likely to be unhappy as those who spent less than an hour a day.

In one experiment, people who were randomly assigned to give up Facebook for a week ended that time happier, less lonely and less depressed than those who continued to use Facebook. In another study, young adults required to give up Facebook for their jobs were happier than those who kept their accounts. In addition, several longitudinal studies show that screen time leads to unhappiness but unhappiness doesn’t lead to more screen time.

It’s not just teens

The current generation of teens (whom I call “iGen” in my book of the same name) spends more time with screens than any previous generation. Time spent online doubled between 2006 and 2016, and 82 per cent of 12thgraders now use social media every day (up from 51 per cent in 2008).

Sure enough, teens’ happiness suddenly plummeted after 2012 (the year when the majority of Americans owned smartphones). So did teens’ self-esteem and their satisfaction with their lives, especially their satisfaction with their friends, the amount of fun they were having, and their lives as a whole. These declines in well-being mirror other studies finding sharp increases in mental health issues among iGen, including in depressive symptoms, major depression, self-harm and suicide. Especially compared to the optimistic and almost relentlessly positive millennials, iGen is markedly less self-assured, and more are depressed.

A similar trend might be occurring for adults: My coauthors and I previously found that adults over age 30 were less happy than they were 15 years ago, and that adults were having sex less frequently.

Although both teen and adult happiness dropped during the years of high unemployment amid the GFC (2008-2010), happiness didn’t rebound after 2012 when the economy was doing progressively better. Instead, happiness continued to decline as the economy improved. Somewhat surprisingly, we found that teens who didn’t use digital media at all were a little less happy than those who used digital media a little bit (less than an hour a day). Thus, the happiest teens were those who used digital media, but for a limited amount of time.

The solution is a familiar adage: everything in moderation.