Social Media Detoxing and its Effect on Self Esteem

Volume 1, No. 1
Online ISSN: 3071-0898

© The authors. This article is published under the terms of the Creative Commons 4.0 License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Social Media Detoxing and its Effect on Self Esteem

CONFERENCE ABSTRACT

Cali Younker* and Tamara Avant⁺

School of Health Sciences, Barton College, Wilson, NC, USA
*Student author, ⁺Faculty mentor

CITATION

Younker, Cali; & Avant, Tamara. (2026). Social media detoxing and its effect on self esteem [Conference abstract]. Barton Journal, 1(1), 211–212. https://bartonjournal.org/vol-1-no-1/2026-cat4-article-no-046

Abstract

A person’s well being can easily be affected by social media. Lui et al. (2025) explains how social media leads to information overload, social comparison, and digital fatigue. It was predicted that most people are highly affected by social media and allow other people’s content to affect how they feel about themselves, subconsciously changing their everyday habits because they were influenced to do so. Participants in this study were mostly freshmen. After conducting a t-test, correlation, and ANOVA, results showed that women (M = 16, SD = 4.02) and men (M = 15, SD = 4.84) had no significant differences in Social Media Addiction (SMA). When measuring the correlation between gender and social media with the Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale (RSS), results indicated a significance for female participants. For women, there was a moderate negative correlation between RSS total and SMA total, r (21) = −.42, p < .05. For men, the correlation between RSS total and SMA total was not statistically significant, r (11) = −.30, p = .325. These results indicated that women’s self esteem was more negatively related to social media than men’s. Because of this, a social media detox for both genders would improve self esteem and well being overall.

Keywords: well-being, social media, social comparison, digital fatigue.

Reference

Liu, Yuyang; Mohamad, Emma M. W.; Azlan, Arina A.; & Tan, Yunpeng. (2025). Am I happier without you? Social media detox and well-being: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Behavioral Sciences, 15(3).doi.org/ 10.3390/bs15030290

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