You have probably noticed it yourself. A long article gets abandoned halfway, a film needs a second screen, and a quiet minute somehow ends with the phone in your hand.
So is social media actually shortening your attention span? The honest answer has two parts: there is a consistent pattern in the research, and there is a limit on what that pattern can prove.
What does the research link to poorer attention?
The largest piece of evidence is on short-form video. A 2025 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pooled 71 studies covering about 98,299 people. Heavier short-form video use was linked to poorer attention and, most strongly, poorer inhibitory control, which is the ability to stop yourself from acting on an impulse. It was also linked to more stress and anxiety.
The word to hold onto is "linked". These studies measure what people do and how they score, not what causes what.
Source: Nguyen et al., Psychological Bulletin, 2025.
An older line of work points the same way. Ophir, Nass and Wagner found in 2009 that heavy media multitaskers did worse on task-switching and filtering tests than light ones. Again, that is an association. People who struggle to filter distractions may simply be drawn to more media.
Source: Ophir, Nass & Wagner, PNAS, 2009.
Can social media cause the change, rather than just go with it?
The best causal evidence comes from a randomised trial, which is the design that can answer this.
Castelo and colleagues published in PNAS Nexus in 2025. They blocked mobile internet on the smartphones of 467 participants for two weeks, while calls and texts still worked. Sustained attention improved by an amount the authors compared to about 10 years of age-related decline. Mental health and subjective well-being improved too, and increased nightly sleep was one of the mechanisms.
That is a strong result, and it points toward cause. It is also one trial, and it blocked all mobile internet, not social media alone. It cannot say which apps did the work.
Source: Castelo et al., PNAS Nexus, 2025.
What is happening in the brain while you scroll?
A few smaller studies offer clues about mechanism, and they should be read as hints rather than settled fact.
In an fMRI study of 56 people by Hong and colleagues, published in NeuroImage, cognitive-control regions (the dACC and dlPFC) deactivated while people watched short videos, most of all for videos they preferred. In an EEG study of 48 people, Yan and colleagues found that a higher short-video addiction tendency went with lower prefrontal theta activity during an attention task and lower self-control.
Source: Yan et al., Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2024. The Hong et al. study has no link available.
Both are small, and neither shows that scrolling permanently changes anything. The fMRI result suggests that regions involved in cognitive control were less active while people watched short videos, and the EEG result links lower prefrontal theta during an attention task to higher addiction tendency.
Does doomscrolling shorten attention span specifically?
No study in this evidence set measures doomscrolling as such, so it would be wrong to claim a finding. As an observation rather than a finding, doomscrolling often looks like feed-based, short-form, high-switching use, which is the kind of use the research above links to poorer attention.
There is also a learning angle. A 2026 study in Communications Psychology found that people learning from short videos had lower immediate memory accuracy and faster forgetting than people learning from longer ones.
Source: Wei et al., Communications Psychology, 2026.
Does it matter how much screen time you have, or how you use it?
Fournier and colleagues, in a study titled "Attention hijacked", found that social media notifications during a focus task caused a brief slowdown in processing. The size of the effect was tied to notification volume and checking habits, not to total screen time.
Separately, an observational study by Heitmayer and Lahlou found that about 89% of smartphone interactions were started by the user, not prompted by a notification.
Source: Heitmayer & Lahlou, Computers in Human Behavior, 2021.
One more result is worth knowing. In a 2017 study by Ward and colleagues, people did best on working-memory and fluid-intelligence tests with their phone in another room, and worst with it on the desk, even when it was silenced and untouched. Later replications found smaller or mixed effects, so treat it as one study, not a rule.
Source: Ward et al., Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2017.
Is there a number for how short attention has become?
Gloria Mark, at UC Irvine, reports in her book Attention Span (2023) that in her recent studies the average time on a single screen before switching was about 47 seconds. It is a measure of switching behaviour on screens, not a measure of your capacity to concentrate. Those are different things, and it is worth not conflating them.
So what is the fair summary?
Heavier use of short-form video is linked to poorer attention and weaker inhibitory control. One randomised trial found that taking mobile internet away for two weeks improved sustained attention. Neither result says your attention is permanently damaged, and neither blames you for a feed built to hold you.
The practical reading is more hopeful than the headline. If the trial is right, attention can improve when the input is removed, though one trial is not the last word.
What can you do about it?
- Cut the interruptions first. Turn off notifications that are not from people. This is advice rather than a research finding, though one study found notifications briefly slowed processing during a focus task.
- Move the phone out of reach while you focus. Another room beats the desk, if you take Ward's result at face value.
- Notice the reach. Since most checks start with you, the pause just before you pick the phone up is the useful place to intervene.
- Give it two weeks, not two days. The trial lasted two weeks, so a short trial of your own is more informative than a few days. This is a suggestion, not a promise of results.
You can do all of this with your phone's built-in settings. If you want help at the moment of reaching, Boredom puts a short guided reset in that gap, but the settings come first.
The research does not say social media has ruined your attention. It says heavier short-form video use is linked to worse focus, and that in one trial attention improved when mobile internet was blocked for two weeks.