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You Don’t Have to Quit Social Media
by Jaydeep P. Digital Marketing | SEO ’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 changing your online habits really might make you feel better. Hall points to another recent study that tracked people abstaining from social media. “On a daily level, they also found no change whether they were on or off social media,” he says. “But this is the crazy part: At the end of the study, people perceived that if they were able to stay off for a greater amount of time, they were better off.”
Those conflicting results, he explains, can be blamed on a cognitive bias called self-efficacy. He says, “When people have control over something they feel isn’t healthy, if they succeed at keeping off of it, they feel better about the outcomes,” regardless of how healthy that thing actually was.
If you’re fine with how much time you currently spend scrolling, though, then stopping won’t change a thing. And it’s perfectly okay to think of social media as a neutral or even net positive force in your life. The popular narrative around social media often overlooks the fact that these platforms do have value, says Jim Brown, the director of the digital studies center at Rutgers University.
“For instance, in addition to sometimes being a trash fire, Twitter is also a place of vibrant activism,” he says. “It’s about being more conscious of why you’re using these things and how they’re making you feel. How do you enjoy [social media] and maximize that to make your life better?”
So really, it’s as simple as this: If social media is making you feel bad, or if you feel bad about yourself for using it, stop. If not, well, carry on, and try not to beat yourself up about it. Save that mental energy for the end of January, when fancy-gym-membership buyer’s remorse sets in.
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About Jaydeep P. 
Digital Marketing | SEO
3,508 connections, 111 recommendations, 7,983 honor points.Joined APSense since, August 12th, 2016, From Ahmedabad, India.
Created on Dec 9th 2019 03:35. Viewed 294 times.
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