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As social media use has increased in prevalence, so have concerns that social media may be detrimental to mental health and wellbeing. The primary aim of the current study was to investigate whether limiting social media use leads to increases in wellbeing. A secondary aim was to assess whether sleep quality contributed to the hypothesized relationship between social media use and wellbeing. One hundred and thirty-two individuals participated in the current study, with half the participants limiting their use of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat for 1 week. Social media use was monitored by having participants email screen shots of their battery usage, which included information on the level of usage for Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Relative to a control group that did not limit social media use, taking a break from social media led to a small improvement in wellbeing. This improvement, at least in part, appears to be due to changes in sleep quality.

Social networking site (SNS) use is common and speculation about the negative impact of SNS use on mental health and psychological well-being is a recurring theme in scientific debates. The evidence for this link, however, is inconclusive. The Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) may assist in understanding the mixed evidence, as individuals who experience FoMO are more driven to keep up with what is happening to avoid missing out. We used a 2-week daily diary study of 408 university students to measure the daily associations between SNS use and negative and positive affect and whether FoMO moderated these associations. Multi-level Bayesian regression analyses revealed that 1) greater SNS use was associated with reductions in successive positive affect, but not increases in negative affect and 2) FoMO moderated the influence of SNS use such that increases in successive negative affect occurred only in those individuals high in trait FoMO.

Despite a growing understanding of the triggers for suicidal thoughts and behavior, little is known about the mechanisms that prevent people from killing themselves. The goal of the present study was to use publicly available Reddit data to better understand the reasons that people give for not following through with a potentially lethal suicide attempt. Threads containing key terms (e.g., "kill yourself") within the subreddit /r/AskReddit were collected and all top posts from these threads were thematically coded. Across the posts collected, 11 different themes were identified; friends and family, curiosity and optimism about the future, spite, purpose, transience, hobbies, animals/pets, fear of survival, fear of pain, death and/or the afterlife, apathy/laziness, and intervention. Some additional themes were captured in an "other" category, and a twelfth theme, use of pharmaceutical drugs, was identified, but not discussed. These findings provide a broad overview about the proximal protective factors that directly stopped people from making a suicide attempt. They also illustrate the potential for Reddit as platform through which to better understand factors that may help to identify and support those in suicidal crisis. Such insight may help to inform intervention and prevention strategies for suicide and those in suicidal crisis.