Does social media make you unhappy? What the 2026 report found

It’s 11.40pm. You opened the app to check one thing. Forty minutes later you know a lot about someone you’ll never meet, and you feel slightly worse than when you started.

So, does social media make you unhappy? The biggest annual study of happiness on the planet spent its 2026 edition on exactly that question. The answer is more useful than “screens bad”. It mostly comes down to what the screen is for.

What is the World Happiness Report, and who makes it?

The World Happiness Report comes out every March, timed for the UN’s International Day of Happiness on 20 March. It’s published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, in partnership with Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and an independent editorial board. Most of its data come from the Gallup World Poll, which asks people to rate their life on a ladder from 0 (the worst possible life) to 10 (the best possible).

The latest edition, published in March 2026, ranks 147 countries. Finland came top for the ninth year running. But the headlines weren’t about Finland. They were about young people and their phones.

Are young people really getting less happy?

In some places, yes, and sharply. Compare 2023-2025 with 2006-2010 and under-25s in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand now rate their lives 0.86 points lower on that 0 to 10 scale, on average. For a whole generation, that’s a big fall.

Here’s the twist: it isn’t a global trend. In 85 of the 136 countries with enough data, under-25s are happier now than they were twenty years ago. So whatever is going on, it isn’t simply “being young in the 2020s”.

Does social media make you unhappy, then?

Heavy use seems to go with feeling worse. The report analysed PISA 2022, an international survey of 15-year-olds in 47 countries that asked how many hours a day they spent on social media and how satisfied they were with life. Satisfaction was highest among light users and lower among heavy ones. Teenagers on social media for more than seven hours a day reported much lower wellbeing than those on it for under an hour. The gap was widest for girls in Western Europe: almost a full point out of 10.

The editors are careful, and you should be too. These are mostly correlations: unhappy teenagers might scroll more, rather than scrolling making them unhappy. The report doesn’t blame the youth decline on any single cause, and it openly hosts the argument. One chapter, by Jonathan Haidt and Zachary Rausch, argues that social media is harming adolescents at a scale large enough to change whole populations. Other researchers in the field read the evidence as weaker. That isn’t a cop-out. It’s what science looks like mid-argument.

One finding cuts against the doom. Young people who use social media for less than an hour a day report higher wellbeing than those who don’t use it at all. Going cold turkey isn’t the happiest setting either.

Why it matters what the screen is for

This is the bit most coverage skipped. Using surveys from 17 Latin American countries, one chapter found that platforms built mainly for keeping in touch with people, such as WhatsApp and Facebook, show a clear positive association with happiness. Platforms driven by algorithmically curated content, the endless personalised feed, tend to show a negative association at high levels of use. The report’s summary makes the same point more broadly: platforms with algorithmic feeds and influencers are more likely to be linked to lower life satisfaction than those that mainly help people talk to each other.

Think about the difference. Messaging your sister about Sunday lunch is connection. A feed serving you an endless loop of other people’s highlights is comparison. Same phone, opposite direction.

There’s a darker detail too. In a sample of US college students, most said they wished social media platforms didn’t exist at all. People stay because everyone else is there, so leaving feels costly even when most would be better off if nobody were on it.

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, who directs the Oxford centre and is one of the report’s editors, put it neatly: “Beyond the complexity, it is clear that we should look as much as possible to put the ‘social’ back into social media.”

What actually predicts happiness? Other people

Zoom out and social media isn’t even the biggest factor. In the 2026 analysis, feeling that you belong at school has a much larger association with teenagers’ life satisfaction than their social media use does.

The 2025 edition, themed around caring and sharing, made the case directly. Three findings worth knowing:

• People are kinder than we think. Comparing how often people expect a lost wallet to be handed back with how often wallets actually come back, the report found real return rates are around twice what people predict. Believing others are kind turned out to be a strong predictor of a country’s happiness, and the Nordic countries rank near the top for both expected and actual returns.
• Eating together matters. Sharing meals with others is strongly linked to wellbeing in every region of the world. Yet in 2023 about one in four Americans said they had eaten all their meals alone the day before, up 53% since 2003.
• More young adults are going it alone. In 2023, 19% of young adults worldwide said they had no one they could count on for social support, a 39% increase on 2006.

Put the two reports side by side and a clear pattern appears. Happiness runs on trust and connection. We underestimate both. And the tech that fills our evenings can either feed that need or quietly crowd it out.

How to use social media without it making you miserable

You don’t need a detox retreat. Try this instead:

1. Sort your apps into two piles. “Talking to people” and “watching a feed”. Keep the first, ration the second.
2. Aim for light, not zero. In the PISA data, the teenagers with the highest life satisfaction used social media for under an hour a day. Put a daily limit on feed apps and leave messaging alone.
3. Swap one scroll for one message. When your thumb heads for the feed, send a voice note to a friend instead. Ask a real question, not just “how are you?”.
4. Share a meal this week. Lunch with a colleague, dinner with a flatmate, a picnic with the friend you keep meaning to see.
5. Bet on people. The wallet data say others are more trustworthy than you assume. Start the conversation, ask the favour, say yes to the invite.

Where Everconnected fits

If you’d like to try this with someone new, Everconnected matches you with people who share your values and interests, for one-to-one conversations by voice. It’s free to join: create an account at app.everconnected.com, or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. Helliwell, J. F., Layard, R., Sachs, J. D., De Neve, J.-E., Aknin, L. B., & Wang, S. (Eds.). (2026). World Happiness Report 2026. University of Oxford: Wellbeing Research Centre. Executive summary: Happiness and social media. www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2026/executive-summary-happines
2. World Happiness Report 2026, Chapter 2: International evidence on happiness and social media (Helliwell, Aknin, Huang, Rojas, Wang et al.). www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2026/international-evidence-on-
3. Haidt, J., & Rausch, Z. (2026). Social media is harming adolescents at a scale large enough to cause changes at the population level. In World Happiness Report 2026. www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2026/social-media-is-harming-ad
4. University of Oxford (19 March 2026). World Happiness Report 2026 shows a complex global picture of social media and happiness [press release]. www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-03-19-world-happiness-report-2026-sho
5. Helliwell, J. F., Layard, R., Sachs, J. D., De Neve, J.-E., Aknin, L. B., & Wang, S. (Eds.). (2025). World Happiness Report 2025. University of Oxford: Wellbeing Research Centre. Executive summary. www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2025/executive-summary
6. University of Oxford (20 March 2025). World Happiness Report 2025 shows people are much kinder than we expect [press release]. www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-03-20-world-happiness-report-2025-sho