👁️ What Your Browsing History Says About Your Mental Health
New research reveals the vicious circle behind how our web browsing behaviors impact our emotional well-being
How do you choose to spend your time online?
The typical internet user now spends over 6.5 hours a day online, and more than half of US teens say they spend almost 5 hours a day just on social media.
You could interpret this as a problem in itself, since our internet usage may be taking up time that we used to spend on other healthy activities like meeting friends in person and going for walks.
But what really determines the quality of our online time is how we use the internet. If we spend our time watching videos that bring us joy and reading articles that are intellectually stimulating, that doesn’t seem so bad. If we’re mostly tracking global wars, going down conspiracy theory rabbit holes, or posting angry comments, we’re probably not feeling happy and fulfilled when bedtime rolls around each night.
Research published just last month (November, 2024) has looked into how our internet usage behaviors interact with our mental health. What they found is a perfect real-life illustration of the phrase “vicious circle”.
🛜 The two-way street between our mood and the internet
In a recently published study, researchers recruited 700+ participants in the US and UK, and asked them to browse the internet anonymously for 20-30 mins each day using a specific browser. After 5 days, the researchers pulled each participant’s browsing history during those periods and analyzed the text at each link to measure the emotional sentiment or “valence” of the webpages.
All participants completed a psychopathology assessment at the start of the study, assessing mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. Each day, both before and after their web browsing sessions, participants also reported on their general mood.
The data showed that browsing webpages with a negative emotional valence was associated with having poorer mental health overall.
In the mood data, the researchers also saw that people who reported the happiest moods before browsing the internet exposed themselves to the least negativity online.
People who browsed less negative webpages also reported greater happiness after browsing the internet. This was true even after controlling for people’s moods before their internet browsing, which means online behavior was linked to people’s post-internet mood reports regardless of how they felt beforehand.
These results together suggest that mood may impact web browsing habits, and web browsing habits may also impact mood. This is the vicious circle I mentioned earlier. When you’re feeling down, you’re more likely to explore content online that fits the same emotional profile, which can then sink you even deeper into emotional distress.
To confirm that these effects were causal rather than merely correlative, the researchers ran another study in which they randomly split 102 participants into two groups, asking one group to explore emotionally negative webpages and the other group to explore neutral webpages.
After this web browsing, participants in the negative condition reported experiencing a worse mood than participants in the neutral condition. When participants were then allowed to freely browse the web for 10 minutes, their browsing histories showed that they spent more time on emotionally negative webpages if they were in the negative condition compared to the neutral condition.
In other words, the vicious circle was again clear and the effects were causal: feeling bad influences you to browse negative content on the internet, and this negative content then causes you to feel even worse.
In a final twist, the researchers tested whether they could shift people’s attention away from negative emotional content simply by labeling it. They showed people the search results page for different Google queries and asked them to select one of those search results to learn more.
In a no-label condition, the search results page contained no emotional labeling (similar to search engines today). In a separate labeling condition, each of the search results on the page came with an emotional tag showing people that the webpage typically made people “feel worse”, “feel better”, or fell somewhere between the two extremes.
Compared to people in the no-label condition, participants in the labeling condition were significantly less likely to click on “feel worse” webpages. Simply by boosting people’s awareness of the emotional valence of different webpages, the researchers were able to shift choices toward less emotionally harmful content.
The internet puts all information at our fingertips, which can be a huge benefit or a huge burden depending on how we use it. By developing a better awareness of how our mood impacts our online behavior and how that online behavior then affects our emotional well-being, we can make more informed choices for our health and happiness.
⭐️ Takeaway tips
#1. Reflect on your mood before launching your browser or social media
Each time you’re about to launch a new browser page or social media app, take a moment to check in with how you’re feeling. Sometimes we pick up our phone to distract ourselves from a problem without considering whether our online activity will make that problem worse. Instead of automatically hitting buttons and viewing content purely out of habit, be conscious of why and when you’re picking up your phone, and whether there’s something else you’d actually prefer to be doing in that moment. If you’re someone who is vulnerable to psychological disorders like depression or anxiety, it’s especially important to reflect on your emotional state before browsing, since your behavior may be biased toward content that reinforces those emotions.
#2. Consider how your mood has changed after putting down your phone
When we’ve spent some time on our favorite news pages and online content, it’s helpful to pause and think about what we’ve lost or gained from the experience. I have a habit of checking the news frequently, and this often leaves me feeling more anxious than I need to feel, impacting my behavior unconsciously throughout my day. By knowing which types of content make us feel better vs worse off, we can be more intentional about the pages we bookmark and revisit in the future.
#3. Be proactive in protecting your emotional health online
During an online browsing session, don’t be too tempted by clickbait headlines or dramatic content recommendations. Try to craft your own course through the online wilderness, and seek the content that’s most likely to help you and least likely to affect you negatively. Instead of hitting the first search result you see on Google, be more cautious about selecting more credible or less dramatic sources of info. Similarly, by skipping through social media content that makes you feel bad, you can push your recommendation algorithms toward healthier content.
“The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts: the less you know the hotter you get.”
~ Bertrand Russell
This is great, Erman. I am guilty of letting my browsing habits lead me into a negativity spiral. I definitely need to be more mindful of my mood before, during and after. So much of it happens subconsciously; I need to be more aware of things.
Thanks for sharing this interesting and valuable research, Erman. It offers great insights for those looking to better regulate emotions like anxiety. At the same time, it’s worth considering that for people who are more comfortable with so-called negative emotions or have strong emotion regulation skills, there could be benefits to following the news or certain social media content—perhaps because it aligns with their values or is essential for their work. For these individuals, monitoring their reactions to what they read might feel less necessary. I’m curious whether the emotion regulation abilities of participants were taken into account in the research. It would interesting to explore how these abilities (or other individual difference variables) might influence the outcomes.