Facebook may be bad for your sense of well-being. A John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study found interactions with Facebook can lead to negative effects.
The study, assessed the associations of both online and offline social networks with several subjective measures of well-being. It looked at both Facebook and real world social activity and their associations with self-reported physical and mental health, self-satisfaction, and body mass index.
The results showed that overall, use of Facebook was negatively associated with well-being. Offline office interactions had a positive effect.
Published by Oxford University Press, the study used data from 5,208 U.S. adults for two years.
Authors Holly Skakya and Nicholas Christakis wrote in Harvard Business Review that all three Facebook activities they measured — liking, posting and clicking links — caused negative self-comparisons that made people feel worse about themselves.
While the study did not address other social media, we wonder if Twitter and the photo-centric Instagram and Snapchat and Pinerest have similar or different effects. The photo apps seem more self-centered than Facebook, and personally, we spend far less time on Twitter than Facebook when engaging with social media online.
