Facebook: Quitting Can Lead To A Happier Life, Study Says
Quitters never win, right? When it comes to social media, that may not be the case. We consistently use social media sites like Facebook, but is it possible that these sites are making us unhappy?
A study from the Happiness Research Institute in Copehagen has found that people who quit using social media sites, particularly Facebook, are happier and experience "a significantly higher level of life satisfaction" than those who continue their online presence on the social media giant.
"We focused on Facebook because it is the social media that most people use across age groups," Meik Wiking, the Happiness Research Institute's chief executive said. The average Facebook user across the globe is 29 years old, with the average United States user being 40.5, according to Chron. However, these statistics must be taken with a grain of salt, since there are more than 80 million fake user profiles on the site.
The study took a sample group of 1,095 people in Denmark, and divided them into two groups - those who continued to use Facebook, the control group, and those who stopped using the site, the treatment group. The Facebook-using group were told to use the site as they normally would. After a week, the groups were evaluated and compared.
At the beginning of the experiment, the two groups rated their "life satisfaction level" on a scale of 1-10. The Facebook users reported a life satisfaction rating of 7.67 at the beginning of the study, with that number bumping up slightly to 7.75 by the end of the week. However, the non-users saw their life satisfaction increase from 7.56 to 8.12 on average, according to the Local.
The treatment group (non-users) also saw their real-world social activity increase, and reported being significantly less angry and lonely during the week they were not on Facebook. The control group reportedly saw none of these changes. Wiking said that these results have a lot to do with the fact that people tend to compare their lives with the lives of others, which Facebook can contribute to greatly.
Sixty-one percent of the experiment's participants claimed that they preferred to post their "good sides" on Facebook, and 69 percent said they only tend to post "great things" that they do on the site, leading to a somewhat misleading representation of the day-to-day life of the average user, according to a news release.
Additionally, half of the Facebook users in the study claimed to envy the experiences of others that were posted on the site, 33 percent envied others apparent happiness, and 40 percent envied the supposed success of others.
"Facebook distorts our perception of reality and of what other people's lives really look like. We take in to account how we're doing in life through comparisons to everyone else, and since most people only post positive things on Facebook, that gives us a very biased perception of reality," Wiking said, according to The Local. "If we are constantly exposed to great news, we risk evaluating our own lives as less good."
The institute referred to the social media site as a "constant flow of edited lives" that can paint a pretty picture to its users, despite sometimes being quite far from the real thing.
The results didn't stop there though. The control group was reportedly 55 percent more likely to feel stressed than their non-using counterparts, who in turn were 18 percent more likely to feel present in the moment than the users. This leads to somewhat disastrous results because "instead of focusing on what we actually need, we have an unfortunate tendency to focus on what other people have," according to the study.
Wiking said he would like to attempt the experiment again, this time with a longer duration away from the site, to see if the effects are long lasting. "You would think that over time, the effect would be larger. But on the other hand, if you do log off Facebook for a longer period of time, that might enhance one's sense of isolation. Facebook is an infrastructure for social events so if you completely log out, you may miss out on some of these social activities," he said.
Most people will continue to use the site regardless of their experience, noted Wiking, which brings forward another question: Why do we willingly participate in activities that don't make us happy?
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