Facebook is making us unhappy and causing people who suffer “Facebook envy” to be particularly depressed, a study has found.
Users who took a week-long break from the social media site were found to be more satisfied with life and rated their own well-being as higher.
The University of Copenhagen experiment involved 1,095 people, half of whom were asked to continue their Facebook habits and half ordered to abstain from logging on.
Those who admitted suffering high levels of Facebook envy, the tendency to be jealous of your friends’ activities on social media, benefited most from going teetotal.
“Millions of hours are spent on Facebook each day,” wrote report author Morten Tromholt.
“We are surely better connected now than ever before, but is this new connectedness doing any good to our well-being?
“According to the present study, the answer is ‘no’. In fact, the predominant uses of Facebook – that is, as a means to communicate and gain information about others, as habitual pastime – are affecting our well-being negatively on several dimensions.”
The sample size was 86 per cent female, spread across Denmark, with an average age of 34, and with an average Facebook-friends count of 350.
