Connected or exhausted? Deciphering potential influences of perceived overload and privacy invasion on poor academic achievement and subjective well-being among university students

Owing to the rapid development of information communication technology, social networking sites (SNSs) have become deeply embedded in university students' daily lives. Although prior studies have documented the negative consequences of excessive SNS use, limited attention has been devoted to how different social media stressors influence academic and psychological outcomes through the stress process. Drawing on the stressor-strain-outcome (SSO) framework, this study conceptualizes perceived overload and privacy invasion as stressors, social network exhaustion and subjective well-being as strain-related psychological responses, and poor academic achievement as the outcome. Using cross-sectional survey data collected from 689 university students in mainland China, the results demonstrate that both information overload and privacy invasion substantially elevate levels of social network exhaustion. Social network exhaustion further predicts lower subjective well-being and poorer academic achievement, while subjective well-being is negatively associated with poor academic achievement. Furthermore, bootstrapping analyses confirm that social network exhaustion significantly mediates the effects of information overload and privacy invasion on poor academic achievement. By incorporating subjective well-being into the stress process, this study enriches the explanatory scope of the SSO framework and provides practical insights for mitigating the adverse effects of SNS use in higher education contexts.