Study: leaving social networks makes people happier

If you feel unhappy - perhaps you should delete your accounts on social networks. This is the conclusion sociologists have come from the Danish Institute for the Study of Happiness (and there is one there). The experiment on the rejection of the social network Facebook was attended by 1095 people aged from 16 to 76 years.

Randomly selected half of the people studied were asked to completely stop using Facebook for a week. The second half of the participants became a control group. At the same time, on average, 94% of the participants in the experiment visited the social network every day, 86% of the participants very often watched the news line, and 78% hung on the network for at least half an hour a day.
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Sociologists have prepared a questionnaire designed to assess the subjective quality of life of people, and conducted surveys, both before the experiment and at its end. It was found that people who refused to use the social network found themselves more satisfied with life.

Also, surveys about people's moods on the last day of the experiment showed that participants who were free from viewing news felt happier, less worried, less irritated, and more enjoying life. In addition, oddly enough, the polls revealed that the refusal to constantly view social networks increases the social activity of people in the real world and satisfaction with their social life.

It was found that after refusing to use Facebook, people have increased ability to concentrate and decrease the feeling that they have wasted time, which they could use to their best advantage.



Based on the study, sociologists made several conclusions. Social networks are a constant source of news. But this news, in essence, is an edited version of other people's life, and it distorts our perception of reality. Instead of focusing on their needs, people concentrate on what others have.

“Facebook is the constant bombardment of good news by others, but when we look out the window, we see only gray sky and rain (especially here in Denmark!),” Says the head of the Institute, Meik Wiking. - It makes the virtual world of Facebook, in which everyone demonstrates only his good and advantageous sides, unnaturally bright. So we decided to see what happens if users take a breather. ”

Now researchers want to establish how long the positive effect of abandoning the use of the social network persists, and what will happen if people take a “vacation” for a longer period. “We would like to experiment with the rejection of the social network for a year,” says Viking. “The only question is how many volunteers can we find for this.”

In general, the results of the work of the researchers brought the following figure: the probability of feeling unhappy among people who constantly use Facebook is 39% higher than those who do not use it. But what should unfortunate people do without accounts in social networks? It is hard to say. Perhaps try to make them.