Quitting Facebook for a month makes users happier, less lonely: study

Studies have previously shown that minimizing social media usage can bring positive results. A new study suggests that quitting Facebook entirely for a month can lead to happier, less anxious lives as well.

Researchers from Stanford and New York University carried out a research to observe what happens when people quit Facebook for a month. The results showed that people were happier, more satisfied with life and slightly less likely to feel anxious, depressed or lonely. Also, they used other social networks less too.

The study consisted of 2,488 people who averaged an hour of Facebook use each day. They then randomly assigned half of them to deactivate their accounts for a month over a control group that would not, explained Tech Crunch.

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The researchers monitored compliance by checking participants’ profiles. The volunteers self-reported a rotating set of well-being measures in real time, including happiness, what emotion a participant felt over the last minutes and a measure of loneliness.

The team reported that quitting Facebook was linked with improvements on well-being measures. They observed that the group that quitted Facebook spent less time on other social networks as well. They instead spent more time in outdoor activities and spending time with family and friends.

However, the participants spent less time consuming news and were less informed, but also showed evidenced of being less politically polarized, ‘consistent with the concern that social media have played some role in the recent rise of polarization in the US’.

“Reduced post-experiment use aligns with our finding that deactivation improved subjective well-being, and it is also consistent with the hypotheses that Facebook is habit forming… or that people learned that they enjoy life without Facebook more than they had anticipated,” the paper’s authors wrote.