Many people feel a constant sense of guilt about how much time they spend on their phones. The usual advice reinforces that feeling by treating screen time as something to cut down as far as possible . But the research on screens and well-being doesn’t support such a simple rule. What seems to matter more is how much time people spend on screens relative to the rest of their lives, how they use that time and who they spend it with.

I call that balance “Goldilocks screen time.” The phrase is my own shorthand rather than a formal term in psychology. It’s inspired by the “digital Goldilocks hypothesis,” an idea tested in a 2017 study published in Psychological Science . The researchers proposed that screen time might be healthiest in moderation. Too little could leave people out of the social life that now happens online, and too much could push out other things people need. The three habits below describe what that middle ground tends to look like.

Habit 1: Keeping Your Screen Time Moderate, Not Minimal

For a long time, the dominant view in this area was the “displacement hypothesis.” It holds that every hour spent on a screen takes an hour away from something healthier, so the harm keeps growing the more a person uses them. The 2017 study tested that assumption with a large sample of English teenagers and found a different pattern.

Moderate use wasn’t linked to lower well-being, and sometimes it went along with slightly higher well-being . A dip appeared only at heavy levels of use, and even then it was small. It was smaller than the difference associated with basic routines like getting regular sleep.

The low end of the curve is easy to overlook. For many teenagers, a phone is where friendships are maintained between school days. A teen who is cut off from it may not feel calmer. They may feel left out of plans and conversations that everyone else is part of.

Timing and context also matter. In the same research, teens could spend more time on screens on weekends than on school days before any drawback showed up. That suggests the problem isn’t the screen itself but what it pushes aside. Consider two people who each spend two hours on their phones in an evening. One watches a show with a family member and goes to bed on time. The other scrolls alone in bed well past midnight and wakes up tired. They’ve used their phones for the same amount of time, but only one of them has lost something important to it.

So instead of fixating on a number of hours, it helps to ask what your screen time is replacing. If it’s filling a quiet afternoon, the cost is probably low. If it’s regularly eating into sleep or time with the people around you, that’s worth paying attention to.

Habit 2: Interacting Instead Of Just Watching Your Screen

Psychologists often distinguish between two ways of using social media. Active use involves engaging with other people through messages, comments and posts. Passive use involves scrolling through other people’s content without interacting.

Passive scrolling has a particular downside that relates to social comparison theory, the well-established idea that people evaluate themselves by comparing themselves with others. What people post online is usually the best version of their lives. If you’re scrolling late at night and see an old classmate’s promotion announcement, you see the good news but not the setbacks or stress behind it. Seeing a steady stream of other people’s best moments makes it easy to feel that your own life doesn’t measure up.

The same moment can go differently if you respond to it. Sending that classmate a short note to congratulate them turns a private comparison into a small act of connection, and it often prompts a friendly reply.

A 2021 study published in PLOS One looked at Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. Passive Facebook use was linked to lower well-being through comparison, while active use of Instagram and Twitter was linked to greater life satisfaction through a sense of social support.

This doesn’t mean that any kind of engagement is good for you. Arguing with strangers, trolling or joining in when a crowd turns on someone are all forms of active use, but they aren’t what the research is pointing to.

Many people know the feeling of winning an argument online and then feeling tense for the rest of the evening. The kind of engagement that seems to help is friendly and mutual, such as responding warmly to a friend’s news or checking in on someone who has been having a hard time.

It’s also worth being honest that the evidence here is mixed. Large reviews find that the effects of active and passive use are modest on average and differ a lot from one person to the next. Active use has also been linked to slightly more anxiety, so posting more isn’t automatically better. This habit is best treated as a helpful tendency rather than a firm rule.

Habit 3: Spending Your Screen Time With Their People

Feeling connected to others is central to human well-being. From that perspective, the most important question about screen time is whether it brings you closer to other people.

A 2024 study published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication , which combined results from more than 100 earlier studies, found that the clearest benefit of social media was social. Active use was consistently linked to feeling supported online. The same analysis found that passive scrolling through general feeds was associated with slightly worse mental health, but passive browsing within online communities built around a shared experience was not.

This fits with everyday experience. Sharing something funny in a group chat with old friends feels different from posting it where only strangers will see it, because your friends know you and are likely to respond. Online communities can offer something similar. A new parent awake with a baby in the middle of the night, or someone living with a chronic illness, may find real comfort in a group of people going through the same thing. Even reading along without posting can feel supportive in a space like that.

In practice, this habit means putting more of your screen time toward the people and communities you care about and less toward content from people you don’t know. It can also mean muting accounts that consistently leave you feeling worse about yourself. A good test is to notice how you feel when you put your phone down. If you usually feel more connected to others, your screen time is probably serving you well.

Ever put your phone down feeling worse than when you picked it up? Find out whether your scrolling habits are quietly draining your mood with this science-backed test: Doomscrolling Scale