Health Watch | Social media anxiety: Losing sleep over likes

For teenagers, a post that does not travel as expected may do more than dent confidence—it could also disturb sleep. An August 2026 Indian study of 150 adolescents from Indore, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Pune—published in The Journal of Theoretical Accounting Research—examined the gap between the number of likes teenagers hoped to receive and what they actually got. Researchers tracked participants for 30 days using smartwatches, monitoring sleep stages, heart-rate variability, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation and overall sleep scores.