Digital Learning Strain and Social Media Use in Relation to Anxiety-Related Symptoms, Stress, and Academic Performance among Students in Pakistan: An Exploratory Cross-Sectional Study

The rapid expansion of digital learning and social media use among Pakistani university students has transformed how they study, communicate, and manage academic responsibilities, while raising concerns about anxiety, stress, and academic outcomes. This exploratory study investigated associations among digital-learning strain, problematic social media use, anxiety-related symptoms, stress, and self-rated academic performance in a sample of 51 students in Pakistan. Data were collected through an anonymous online questionnaire using convenience/snowball sampling. The questionnaire included researcher-developed digital-learning and social-media items and abbreviated items inspired by the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item scale and the Perceived Stress Scale; these adapted items were not administeredor scored as the original validated instruments. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations, and independent-samples t tests were used. Problematic social media use was positively associated with the anxiety index, r(49) = .42, p = .002, stress index, r(49) = .42, p = .002, and concentration difficulty, r(49) = .43, p = .002. Digital-learning fatigue/difficulty was positively associated with stress, r(49) = .53, p < .001. Stress was negatively associated with self-rated academic performance, r(49) = -.30, p = .031, whereas anxiety was not significantly associated with performance. Daily social media hours were not significantly associated with anxiety, stress, or performance. Male respondents reported higher problematic social-media-use scores than female respondents, t(49) = 2.29, p = .026; no significant gender differences were observed for anxiety, stress, or academic performance. Because the sample was small, nonprobability-based, and included both university- and college-level students, the findings should be interpreted as exploratory and not generalized to Pakistani students as a whole. The study supports further research using larger, representative samples and fully validated measures.