Social Media Addiction Test

You wake up and reach for your phone before your eyes are fully open. A quick check of your notifications turns into an hour of mindless scrolling. You promise yourself you will cut back, but the urge to log back on always wins. When you finally force yourself to put the screen down, you feel restless and irritable. It is a cycle that feels less like a bad habit and more like a compulsion.

This test measures your risk of problematic social media use across six core dimensions of behavioral addiction. It maps the psychological patterns that drive your scrolling, from using apps to escape negative moods to the conflicts it causes in your daily life. Higher scores indicate a greater likelihood that your digital habits have crossed the line into an addiction.

Developed in 2016 by Cecilie Schou Andreassen at the University of Bergen and Mark D. Griffiths at Nottingham Trent University, the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale (BSMAS) is the most widely used tool for measuring problematic social media use globally¹. It adapts Griffiths' foundational components model of behavioral addiction—originally applied to gambling and gaming—to the digital landscape of Instagram, TikTok, and X². While popular media often labels any heavy screen time as an "addiction," clinical researchers are increasingly careful to distinguish between highly engaged, enthusiastic use and genuinely dysregulated behavior that impairs your life³. The BSMAS cuts through the noise by measuring the specific psychological mechanisms that separate a harmless habit from a compulsive need.

The test breaks your digital habits down into six interacting forces. Salience is the cognitive real estate social media occupies in your brain. It is the phenomenon of waking up and immediately thinking about your notifications, or mentally planning your next post while having dinner with a friend. But salience alone is not necessarily toxic. When paired with Tolerance—the creeping need to spend more time scrolling to feel the same baseline sense of connection or satisfaction—you get a profile of high engagement. You might spend hours online, but if it stops there, you might just be a heavy user. Recent research suggests that salience and tolerance are often "peripheral" criteria; for some people, they actually correlate with higher life satisfaction and self-esteem, reflecting an active, albeit intense, social life³.

The pathology begins when these peripheral behaviors collide with Mood modification. This is the emotional pivot: you are no longer just scrolling for entertainment; you are scrolling to numb out, escape personal problems, or self-medicate anxiety. When mood modification becomes your primary coping strategy, the absence of the app triggers Withdrawal. You feel restless, irritable, and physically uncomfortable when you leave your phone in another room or lose internet access. Network analysis of the BSMAS reveals that withdrawal is often a central node in the symptom network, acting as a bridge that turns a bad habit into a psychological dependency⁴. The "anxious escaper" scores high on mood modification and withdrawal, meaning their digital life is a load-bearing pillar for their emotional regulation.

Eventually, this reliance bleeds into the real world, manifesting as Conflict. You start ignoring your partner, letting work deadlines slip, or sacrificing sleep to keep scrolling. You recognize the damage and try to pull back, but you hit the wall of Relapse. You delete the app, only to reinstall it two days later in a moment of weakness. High relapse combined with high conflict is the hallmark of true behavioral addiction. You are watching the negative consequences pile up, yet you have lost the executive control to stop. When these "core" criteria dominate your profile, social media ceases to be a tool for connection and becomes a source of psychological distress³.

Your overall score places you in a percentile relative to the general population, reflecting your risk of Problematic Social Media Use (PSMU). Research using the BSMAS has shown that scores above a provisional threshold (often cited as >19 on the original 30-point scale) reliably predict higher levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness, alongside lower self-esteem⁵. However, a high score does not automatically mean you have a clinical psychiatric disorder; the construct is not yet formalized in the DSM-5. Instead, it predicts functional impairment. For example, in large adolescent samples, BSMAS scores strongly correlated with daily hours spent online (β = 0.281) and ADHD-related inattention, even after controlling for age and gender⁶. Greek validation studies using ROC analysis found the scale accurately discriminates at-risk users with an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.723, meaning it is a solid, albeit imperfect, screener for digital distress⁷.

Crucially, the data shows that problematic use is a remarkably stable trait across different demographics. A study of 1,120 Chinese university students confirmed strict measurement invariance across genders, meaning the test measures the exact same underlying pathology in men and women without bias⁸. Furthermore, despite widespread panic about a pandemic-induced spike in screen time, meta-analytic data reveals that global PSMU prevalence has not dramatically increased over the past seven years, though it varies significantly by country and age group⁹. Ultimately, your percentile indicates how much friction social media is causing in your life, not just how many hours you log.

This expanded version of the BSMAS uses 24 items across a mixed response format to capture the nuances of your digital habits. Your responses are calculated into factor scores for each of the six dimensions and then mapped to overall percentiles to show where you stand compared to average users. Mixed profiles are incredibly common. The "functional scroller," for instance, might score in the 90th percentile for salience and tolerance, but remain in the 10th percentile for conflict and relapse, indicating heavy but non-destructive use. Conversely, the "paralyzed escaper" might have low tolerance but spike in mood modification and withdrawal, feeling intense distress even with minimal screen time. By breaking your score down into these interacting components, the test reveals exactly where your relationship with social media shifts from a tool you use to a compulsion that uses you.

Footnotes

1. Bottaro, R., Griffiths, M. D., & Faraci, P. (2025). Meta-analysis of Reliability and Validity of the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale (BSMAS). International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction. doi:10.1007/s11469-025-01461-x ↩

2. Zarate, D., Hobson, B. A., March, E., Griffiths, M. D., & Stavropoulos, V. (2023). Psychometric properties of the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale: An analysis using item response theory. Addictive Behaviors Reports, 17, 100473. doi:10.1016/j.abrep.2022.100473 ↩

3. Ciudad-Fernández, V., Fournier, L., Escrivá-Martínez, T., Baños, R., Zarco-Alpuente, A., & Billieux, J. (2025). Salience and tolerance are not indicators of problematic social media use: Evidence from the Social Media Disorder Scale and the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 14(3), 1380–1393. doi:10.1556/2006.2025.00073 ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Stănculescu, E. (2022). The Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale Validity in a Romanian Sample Using Item Response Theory and Network Analysis. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 21(4), 2475–2492. doi:10.1007/s11469-021-00732-7 ↩

5. Monacis, L., de Palo, V., Griffiths, M. D., & Sinatra, M. (2017). Social networking addiction, attachment style, and validation of the Italian version of the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 6(2), 178–186. doi:10.1556/2006.6.2017.023 ↩

6. Lin, C., Broström, A., Nilsen, P., Griffiths, M. D., & Pakpour, A. H. (2017). Psychometric validation of the Persian Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale using classic test theory and Rasch models. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 6(4), 620–629. doi:10.1556/2006.6.2017.071 ↩

7. Dadiotis, A., Bacopoulou, F., Kokka, I., Vlachakis, D., Chrousos, G. P., Darviri, C., & Roussos, P. (2021). Validation of the Greek version of the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale in Undergraduate Students. EMBnet.journal, 26(1), e975. doi:10.14806/ej.26.1.975 ↩

8. Yue, H., Zhang, X., Cheng, X., Liu, B., & Bao, H. (2022). Measurement Invariance of the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale Across Genders. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.879259 ↩

9. Casale, S., Akbari, M., Seydavi, M., Bocci Benucci, S., & Fioravanti, G. (2023). Has the prevalence of problematic social media use increased over the past seven years and since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic? A meta-analysis of the studies published since the development of the Bergen social media addiction scale. Addictive Behaviors, 147, 107838. doi:10.1016/j.addbeh.2023.107838 ↩