Spending excessive hours on social media may be ruining your life — and not only because the Web is a gargantuan time-suck. According to a recent study, it’s also making you feel miserable about your wealth, your job and the way in which you spend your leisure time.
Researchers at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have found that young adults who spend more than one hour per day on social media are likelier to be depressed than those who don’t. Authors of the study report that “exposure to highly idealized representations of peers on social media elicits feelings of envy and the distorted belief that others lead happier, more successful lives.”
So next time you find yourself in a negative spiral, wondering why your pals have better work situations, hotter boyfriends or girlfriends and cooler travel experiences than you do, get a grip and realize that they’re putting only the good stuff online.
That said, according to EurekAlert, our friends at the University of Pittsburgh reveal that too much time on social media can make things even worse. Besides turning you jealous and miserable, it will warp your self-image.
“We’ve long known that exposure to traditional forms of media, such as fashion magazines, is associated with the development of disordered eating and body-image concerns,” says Jaime E. Sidani, lead author of the University of Pittsburgh study. “Social media combines many of the visual aspects of traditional media with the opportunity for social media users to interact and propagate stereotypes that can lead to eating and body image concerns.”
If that’s not bad enough, another study reports that the Facebookers with whom you align are invariably more popular than you are — and that’s for real. Due to a mathematical phenomenon known as the “friendship paradox,” almost everyone is less popular than their social-media friends. The study, published in a science journal called PLOS One, points out that the people you friend online invariably have more friends than you do. This is because people who have more friends have higher likelihood of being your friends as well.
Providing some consolation is the fact that this holds true for folks near the zenith of social-media’s popularity food-chain as much as it does for the rest of us. According to “PLOS One,” the friendship-paradox even impacts those in Twitter’s top .05-percent.
In case that is not enough to alleviate online social-anxiety, there is a simple solution: Shut down your computer, ditch-out on your virtual friends and find some real ones.