You might well be addicted to it, but quitting Facebook would actually make you happy, suggests a new study done by Denmark-based think tank Happiness Research Institute.
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“We focused on Facebook because it is the social media that most people use across age groups”, Meik Wiking, HRI’s chief executive told AFP today in Copenhagen, the Danish capital.
Half of them carried on using Facebook as usual whereas the rest spent their time away from the social network.
Subjects in the study “reported higher levels of life satisfaction and better concentration, as well as feeling less lonely, less stressed and more sociable”, and even took up antiquated activities such as talking to people in real life. 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.
On the other hand, the group that avoided social media for a week had their happiness levels surging from 7.56 to 8.12.
Comparison is the ultimate killer of happiness, and since most people tend to post only positive things on Facebook, it gives us a very biased – and false – perception of reality.
Overall, the non-Facebook group had 18 percent more chances to live the moment and feel present.
The researchers ascribe anxiety associated with Facebook use to envy at other people’s lives as they are seen enjoying albeit in edited highlights.
In the study, 61 per cent of the participants said they prefer to post their “good sides” on Facebook and 69 per cent prefer to post photos of the “great things” in their lives on the site.
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“If we are constantly exposed to great news, we risk evaluating our own lives as less good”, Wiking said. It doesn’t only distort the way we perceive reality, but also how other people’s lives really look like.
