How much stress is social media really causing in your life?

There are constant warnings from various experts about the potential risks of too much screen time, and most of those hours are often spent on various social media platforms.

So how much are we actually harming ourselves with this digital addiction?

Dr Herkulaas Combrink is the co-director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Digital Futures at the University of the Free State. He shares some insights from his study using a Social Stress Indicator (SSI), which is a computational tool he devised for quantifying social stress in real time.

"The Social Stress Indicator is really a 'digital thermometer' for stress... we're trying to ascertain whether or not our responses to social stress, given social media, has other consequences that we can measure."

Dr Combrink explains that it's not as simple as saying that social media use causes anxiety.

"If you have a set of platforms that can get the entirety of civilisation on there, then you will get the entirety and the scope of all types of behaviour and consequences of behaviour."

To listen to Dr Herkulaas Combrink speaking to 702's John Perlman, click the audio below: