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You Don’t Have to Quit Social Media
Getting off the ‘gram probably won’t improve your life
’Tis the season for dreaming of your ideal self: The healthier, wiser, more productive person you’ll be as soon as the calendar turns and all your resolutions kick into gear. Once you purchase that extra-fancy gym membership, you tell yourself, you’ll become the type of person who voluntarily — joyfully, even — goes on long, early morning runs. Maybe you’ll start posting sweaty selfies captioned with marathon times. Or, scratch that, maybe this will be the year that you finally leave Instagram.
I’m not here to convince you out of the gym thing. But if part of your journey into the new decade does include plans to get off social media, there’s something you should know: It might not make you any happier. A new study published in the journal Media Psychology found that abstaining from social media, even for as long as a month, had no noticeable impact on people’s reported levels of loneliness, life satisfaction, or general well-being.
The results were a surprise, says Jeffrey Hall, the study’s lead author and a professor of communication at the University of Kansas. Based on prior research, Hall and his colleagues had initially assumed that giving up social media would make people feel better about their lives.
In fact, Hall says, the original purpose of this latest study was to find out how quickly that emotional boost took hold. “What I was trying to understand was how many days off you need before you get these positive effects,” Hall says. “We had people staying off for two weeks, three weeks, the whole month. It didn’t matter how you cut the data: On a daily basis, it made no real difference.”
There’s a long history of studies that look at the relationship between negative feelings and social media. “A person asks, ‘How much social media do you use?’ And then, ‘How do you feel? Lonely? Depressed?’ Overwhelmingly, the research has shown a correlation,” he says. But while we’re simultaneously more online and lonelier than ever, Hall says, this latest research suggests that there isn’t a causal relationship between those two things.
One caveat: If you already actively believe that Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk are making you feel worse, then…
