Stress Bytes: Decoding the Associations between Internet Use and Perceived Stress

2025-05-21

AI Summary

This study investigates the longitudinal association between Internet usage behaviors and subjective stress. Drawing on seven-month URL-level browsing logs, demographic information, and monthly stress assessments from 1,490 German users, we develop a multidimensional contextual framework—characterizing usage along the dimensions of *how*, *where*, *when*, and *who*. Using longitudinal mixed-effects modeling and large-scale real-world behavioral labeling, we identify generalizable patterns linking specific usage categories to stress: social, entertainment, shopping, and gaming activities exhibit significant positive associations with stress, whereas productivity, news, and adult content usage show negative associations. These findings provide novel empirical evidence for digital mental health interventions, enabling the development of personalized, behaviorally informed strategies to regulate online activity in support of psychological well-being.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Web
• Humans and AI: User Experience and Usability

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Studies of user behavior, including longitudinal effects of personalized systems
• Responsible Web: Mitigating online harms, including harassment, spam, and fake reviews
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Robustness and generalizability of Web mining methods

Abstract

In today's digital era, internet plays a pervasive role in our lives, influencing everyday activities such as communication, work, and leisure. This online engagement intertwines with offline experiences, shaping individuals' overall well-being. Despite its significance, existing research often falls short in capturing the relationship between internet use and well-being, relying primarily on isolated studies and self-reported data. One of the major contributors to deteriorated well-being - both physical and mental - is stress. While some research has examined the relationship between internet use and stress, both positive and negative associations have been reported. Our primary goal in this work is to identify the associations between an individual's internet use and their stress. For achieving our goal, we conducted a longitudinal multimodal study that spanned seven months. We combined fine-grained URL-level web browsing traces of 1490 German internet users with their sociodemographics and monthly measures of stress. Further, we developed a conceptual framework that allows us to simultaneously explore different contextual dimensions, including how, where, when, and by whom the internet is used. Our analysis revealed several associations between internet use and stress that vary by context. Social media, entertainment, online shopping, and gaming were positively associated with stress, while productivity, news, and adult content use were negatively associated. In the future, the behavioral markers we identified can pave the way for designing individualized tools for people to self-monitor and self-moderate their online behaviors to enhance their well-being, reducing the burden on already overburdened mental health services.

Problem

• Examining links between internet use and perceived stress levels
• Analyzing contextual factors affecting stress from online activities
• Identifying behavioral markers for self-monitoring digital well-being

Innovation

• Longitudinal multimodal study with URL-level data
• Conceptual framework for contextual internet use
• Identified behavioral markers for stress associations