Can TikTok help young people take a break from screens?

NEW YORK – How do you stop doomscrolling? By setting a time limit? Putting your phone in a different room? Deleting the app altogether?

On May 15, TikTok announced a new option: a nightly in-app guided meditation exercise that is switched on by default for users younger than 18.

At 10pm, their For You Page is overtaken by a blue screen and relaxing music, and the user is guided to “inhale”, “hold” and “exhale”.

The idea is that “after that meditation is over, you put down your phone”, said Dr Willough Jenkins, a child psychiatrist who shares mental health-related content on the app. TikTok enlisted her as a paid partner to help promote the initiative.

Users who opt in to the function can dismiss the guided meditation and return to scrolling, but if they are still on the app after an hour, they are shown a second, full-screen prompt that requires them to select an option: Keep using the app for 15 more minutes, opt out of any additional notifications for the day or go to their settings to make changes.

Users aged 18 or older can switch on the feature, called “Meditation in Sleep Hours”, at any time from their settings page.

The new feature, which TikTok says is meant to encourage young people to practise healthier digital habits, is being rolled out as the platform faces widespread allegations that it has knowingly harmed users’ mental health.

This includes a raft of

lawsuits filed in October 2024

by 13 American states and the District of Columbia, accusing TikTok of creating an intentionally addictive app that harmed children and teenagers while making false claims to the public about its commitment to safety.

Many of the states’ claims centre on features that they say keep children using the app deep into the night, when they would otherwise be asleep. “Meditation in Sleep Hours” seems purpose-built to counter those allegations.

“We know that meditation has so many benefits for youth, and for adults, too, especially around sleep initiation,” said Dr Jenkins, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. “Being able to access a guided meditation, to learn some of these skills to transition your brain into sleep mode, is such a key skill.”

Student Sabina Gilyazova, 15, from the Rego Park neighbourhood of New York City’s Queens borough, found the feature “annoying because it just interrupts my precious phone time”. She said the feature would not work on her because “I have free will, so I just click off”.

Dr Yann Poncin, a professor of child psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, probably would not be surprised by Sabina’s reaction.

“Teenagers are a lot about control and autonomy,” he said. “They’re thinking, ‘I want to be on TikTok when I want to be on TikTok. I don’t need this stupid thing interrupting what I’m doing.’”

In March, TikTok said it had tested a similar feature for users younger than 16 who were on the app after 10pm. According to the app, 98 per cent of users did not manually switch off the feature in their settings.

According to Dr Poncin, the strength of the initiative is in the “friction” it creates for users to stay on the app. “So, I do think it’s helpful for those kids who really know for themselves it’s a problem,” he said.

Even then, it can be difficult to stop using the app.

“These algorithms are incredibly powerful,” Dr Poncin said. “They’re incredibly gamified. So, it’s sort of like, we have fentanyl here for you, but if you want to smell roses over on the left side, we have some roses for you to smell. But we still have this algorithm that’s going to suck you in like a drug. It’s an asymmetric battle.”

Users who have different limits set on apps, including Instagram and TikTok, said they are easy to ignore.

In 2024, Ms Chioma Chioma-Ozukwe, 19, a college student in San Diego, tried using a feature on TikTok that would interrupt her after scrolling for an hour. She would then type in a passcode to continue using the app.

“It just infuriated me if I was in the middle of a scroll,” said Ms Chioma-Ozukwe. She felt “Meditation in Sleep Hours” was a “performative” initiative from TikTok.

Ms Siriveena Nandam, a 26-year-old user-experience designer in Washington, D.C., said: “It’s ironic that these apps have built-in features that make it addictive, but then they’re trying to go out and create screen-time things when their intent of the app is to keep people on the screen for as long as possible.”

Ms Nandam said she had even bought third-party apps to help her stop doomscrolling because she was committed to lowering her screen time, which she estimated was about eight hours a day. None of them helped her decrease her social media use.

“The only thing that I found worked was physically distancing myself from the phone,” she said. NYTIMES