A 2-Year Study of More Than 5,000 People

Shows This 1 Activity Destroys Your Emotional

and Physical Health
“This may sound like typical anti-social media crankiness
from academia, but this time they have some impressive
research to back up their case.”
- Minda Zetlin

Want to stay healthy, both emotionally and physically? Researchers

from UC San Diego and Yale have some simple advice for you: Limit the
amount of time you spend on Facebook. While this may sound like typical
anti-social media crankiness from academia, this time they have some
impressive research to back up their case. Holly Shakya, assistant
professor at UC San Diego, and Yale professor Nicholas Christakis spent
two years following 5,208 adults who are part of a Gallup long-term
study. After asking permission, they monitored these subjects' Facebook
use directly from Facebook, rather than asking subjects to report their
own use. (People often don't realize how much time they spend on the
social network.) And they checked in with subjects on their emotional and
physical well-being, as well as their body-mass index (BMI), three times
over the course of two years.

"Overall, our results showed that, while real-world social networks were
positively associated with overall well-being, the use of Facebook was negatively
associated with overall well-being," the researchers wrote in a Harvard
Business Review article. "These results were particularly strong for mental
health; most measures of Facebook use in one year predicted a decrease
in mental health in a later year." Yikes.

Why is too much Facebook bad for your emotional health? Previous
research has shown that the social network creates a sort of false peer
pressure. Since most people are cautious about posting negative or
upsetting experiences on Facebook, the social network creates a
misleading environment where everyone seems to be doing better and
having more fun than you are. As the researchers put it, "Exposure to the
carefully curated images from others' lives leads to negative self-comparison."

No comparison for the real thing.

But what of Facebook's magical ability to connect you to friends and

family even when they're far away? To help you find long-lost friends and
relatives? To help you keep up on what's going on with all the important
people in your life? There's lots of research to show that having a social
circle and an active social life and community leads to better health and
greater longevity. The researchers wondered if a virtual social life and
community would create the same benefits.

No, they don't, as these results make clear--in fact they have the
opposite effect. In addition to negative self-comparison, the researchers
note, increased use of Facebook and other social media tends to take up a
lot of people's time and can create an illusion of closeness. To the extent
that time spent on Facebook takes you away from real-world social
gatherings, you lose the benefit of being in a community, the researchers
say.

The same is likely true if you're at a gathering in body, but your eyes
and mind are locked on your smartphone, checking out your friends'
latest posts.

Minda Zetlin is co-author of The Geek Gap