Stay Off Facebook If You Want To Be Happier: Here’s Why

One week later, those who had not logged into Facebook had their happiness boosted to 8.12 out of ten. A total of 1,095 Facebook users were asked to evaluate their overall life satisfaction on a scale from 1 to 10 based on different factors, such as how happy they were, how much they enjoyed life, whether they felt anxious or sad, and if they were enthusiastic or decisive.

Study… the Happiness Research Institute in Denmark found Facebook generally makes people feel lonely and angry.

“We look at a lot of data on happiness and one of the things that often comes up is that comparing ourselves to our peers can increase dissatisfaction”, said Meik Wiking, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen.

From the On This Day feature (we don’t want to know how old we’ve got, thanks) to the constant barrage of people doing better than you, it’s unsurprising that a Facebook cleanse means an emotional/mental cleanse.

Mr Wiking said the social networking site was “a non-stop good news channel that paints false pictures of edited lives”.

One of the volunteers, 35-year-old Sophie Anne Dornoy said, ‘When I woke up, even before getting out of bed, I’d open Facebook on my phone just to check if something exciting or important had happened during the night. “Facebook is an infrastructure for social events so if you completely log out, you may miss out on a few of these social activities”, he said.

More than a thousand people took part in the study in Denmark, half of them continued to use Facebook as normal the other half were unable to read their friends updates. The first continued to use social media without change. After all, as he says, “it’s also common wisdom that smoking is bad, yet we continue to do it”.

And, it did according to the report: ‘The Facebook Experiment: Does social media affect the quality of our lives?’ by the Happiness Research Institute.

“If we are constantly exposed to great news, we risk evaluating our own lives as less good”.

Wiking stressed that the findings would encourage people to rethink how they use the social media app. While there are positive effects of social media, people need to be aware of how it can easily distort one’s perception of what is real and what is not.

At the end of the week, participants were required to rate the level of “life satisfaction” on either using the service or abstaining on a score of 1 to 10.

More about the Facebook experiment can be found here.