Want to be happier? Give up Facebook
Giving up Facebook boosts happiness and reduces anger and loneliness, researchers found when they deprived regular users.
Life satisfaction rose significantly in the space of a week when participants were unable to read the updates of their friends, according to the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen.
The think tank said that it was surprised by the change it found in such a short time, and that it hoped to raise awareness of the influence of social media on feelings of fulfilment.
Facebook and similar sites are “a constant flow of edited lives which distort our view of reality”, it said in its report, The Facebook Experiment.
The institute recruited 1,095 people in Denmark, asking half of them to avoid Facebook for a week. Participants were asked to rate their life satisfaction on a scale of one to ten before and after the experiment.
The control group, which continued to use Facebook as normal, gave an average score of 7.67 before the experiment and 7.75 afterwards.
The average score of the Facebook-free group rose from 7.56 to 8.12 over the week. They also reported an increase in “real-world social activity” and were less angry and less lonely than those who had continued to use Facebook.
After a week away, 88 per cent described themselves as happy, compared with 81 per cent of Facebook regulars. Eighty-four per cent said that they were enjoying life, compared with 75 per cent of the control group.
Meik Wiking, the head of the institute, said: “We have known for some time that social comparisons matter when it comes to life satisfaction. So we thought, let’s see whether we can detect a Facebook effect because of this constant bombardment of great news happening to other people.
“Every time you look, someone is getting married or has got a great job in New York or is having a holiday in Tahiti. How does this affect our perception of reality and how we value our own lives?”
The researchers said that the impact Facebook had on life satisfaction was roughly half of that attributed to the income disparity between the richest 10 per cent and the poorest 10 per cent.
Mr Wiking urged Facebook users to share more of their failures and disappointments. “We hope the experiment helped to highlight the negative impact of being bombarded with a distorted reality,” he said.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/health/me ... 610644.ece
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