Study: leaving social networks makes people happier

If you feel unhappy - perhaps you should delete your accounts on social networks. This conclusion was reached by sociologists from the Danish Institute for the Study of Happiness (and there is one). In an experiment to abandon the social network Facebook took part 1095 people aged 16 to 76 years.

A randomly selected half of the people studied was asked to completely abandon Facebook for a week. The second half of the participants became a control group. At the same time, on average, 94% of the participants in the experiment visited social networks daily, 86% of the participants very often looked at the news feed, and 78% hung on the network for at least half an hour a day.

Sociologists prepared a questionnaire designed to assess the subjective quality of life of people, and conducted surveys, both before the experiment and at the end of it. It was found that people who refused to use the social network found themselves very satisfied with their lives.

Surveys about people's moods on the last day of the experiment showed that participants free from viewing news feeds felt happier, were less worried, were less annoyed, and enjoyed life more. In addition, strangely enough, polls revealed that refusing to constantly view social networks increases the social activity of people in the real world and satisfaction with their social life.

It was found that after refusing to use Facebook, people have an increased ability to concentrate and lessen the feeling that they spent in vain time that they could use more profitably.



Based on the study, sociologists made several conclusions. Social networks are a constant source of news. But this news, in fact, is an edited version of other people's lives, and they distort our perception of reality. Instead of focusing on their needs, people focus on what others have.

“Facebook is a constant bombardment of other people's good news, but when we look out our window, we only see gray sky and rain (especially here, in Denmark!),” Says Make Viking[Meik Wiking], head of the Institute. - This makes the virtual world of Facebook, in which everyone demonstrates only their good and beneficial sides, unnaturally bright. So we decided to see what happens if users take a break. ”

Now, the researchers want to establish how long the positive effect of abandoning the use of the social network lasts, and what happens if people take a “vacation” for a longer period. “We would like to conduct an experiment with the abandonment of the social network for a year,” says Viking. “The only question is how many volunteers we can find for this.”

In general, according to the results of the work, the researchers deduced the following figure: the probability of feeling unhappy among people who constantly use Facebook is 39% higher than those who do not use it. But what do unhappy people do without accounts on social networks? Hard to tell. Perhaps try to get them.