Smartphones and borderline personality disorder: what apps reveal about emotional struggles

Researchers tracked how people with borderline personality disorder (BPD) used smartphones during therapy to see if app habits matched their emotional states. Over eight weeks, 49 participants reported their inner tension and dissociation levels every two hours while their app use was recorded. The study compared communication apps like messaging services with entertainment apps such as streaming platforms. The goal was to check if certain app behaviors linked to emotional changes in real time.The results showed a clear pattern. People who spent more time on messaging apps tended to feel more inner tension on average. Surprisingly, incoming calls—rather than outgoing ones—also appeared tied to higher tension and dissociation. On the other hand, using entertainment apps for longer stretches seemed to ease inner tension temporarily. Streaming services like Netflix and YouTube had this calming effect, but they didn’t reduce dissociation. When looking at short-term changes, frequent messaging app use often worsened inner tension and dissociation. The same was true for WhatsApp specifically. This suggests that while passive entertainment might help people cope briefly, active communication through apps could trigger emotional distress. The findings support the idea that smartphones might both help and hurt emotional regulation in BPD, depending on how they’re used.