World Happiness Report 2026: Heavy Social Media Use Linked to Lower Life Satisfaction Among Teenagers

According to the World Happiness Report 2026, life satisfaction among adolescents is lower due to heavy social media use. This is based on self-reported data from a subset of the OECD’s 2022 PISA survey, which covers over 270,000 students aged 15 to 16 across 47 countries. This study studies how time spent on social networking sites affects overall satisfaction in life. In the report, most studies focus on negative mental health effects; fewer study positive well-being measures such as life satisfaction are looking at positive outcomes of illness, according to the paper.

Teen Social Media Use Linked to Lower Life Satisfaction, Global Study Shows

The study says among girls who spent less than an hour a day on social media were the most satisfied with life, and that marks had dropped as usage increased. Compared with light users, girls who spent more than five to seven hours a day on social media were much less likely for reporting poor life satisfaction.

The difference was less pronounced in other parts of the world (in Western Europe, and English-speaking countries), while light users reported more satisfaction for life than heavy users among boys. Both heavy users and non-users were more likely to report either very high or very low life satisfaction across regions, indicating that the general perception of how satisfied they felt with their lives was much greater.

This research uses self-reported responses, where students were asked to estimate their daily time spent browsing social networks and rate how satisfied they were with their lives on a scale of zero or 10. The definition for low life satisfaction was zero to four, and a 10 score indicated full satisfaction.

Users of heavy users were also more likely to report low life satisfaction. In Western Europe, heavy users were 63 percent more likely to report low life satisfaction than light users for girls who were heavily used. Of boys in the same area, heavy users were 84 percent more likely to report low satisfaction among their peers. Similarly, in Asia and Central and Eastern Europe similar trends were observed.

Similarly, the findings also show that most adolescents said they spent less than two hours a day on social media (although it might be not including time spent on video sites). Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa saw the highest number of heavy users in their share, as well as the most popular with s.

Among adolescents, social media use is widespread approximately 78 percent of the world’s youth are active and teens in the US spend an average of 4 per cent on social networking. 8 hours a day on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.