A new study found that passively viewing social media content isn’t the main contributor to your rapidly deteriorating mental health — it’s all the posting on social media that’s driving you insane.
The study from University College London was published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, which sounds like a journal dedicated to looking up what disease you might have on WebMD. The researchers analyzed data from over 15,000 adults in the UK aged 16 and up. The participants had originally, uh, participated in a study called “Understanding Society” wherein they were asked a series of questions about their social media use.
The lead author of the study, Dr. Ruth Plackett, says “active” social media use, which constitutes actions like posting your inane thoughts for the world to see, has a much bigger impact on your mental health than just kicking back and reading the posts of people slowly being driven mad by their own thoughts. This means anyone who posts a lot should be given some kind of medal for their sacrifice.
Their findings suggest that posting could lead to negative interactions or anxiety over other people’s judgment, which all contribute to worsening your mental state. The most interesting part, though, is that the research found people who both posted frequently and viewed posts frequently had the highest levels of distress, regardless of age or gender. It’s really just confirmation of what we already knew: social media is the fucking devil and it’s ruining us and we should have stopped when we invented Club Penguin.
The mental health of the participants involved was measured by asking the subjects 12 questions, such as whether they recently had issues concentrating, sleeping, or were feeling a little more stressed than usual. Each question was scored from 0 to 3, meaning the total score could range from 0 to 36. The higher the score, the higher the levels of psychological distress.
The folks who posted every day had higher scores than those who only used social media as a passive experience. To be fair, the difference in scores between those who never posted and those who posted a ton wasn’t massive, but it was enough to suggest that even a little bit of posting online can make your life more stressful than if you never posted at all.
You could just step away from the internet altogether but apparently, that’s just as difficult as quitting drugs so, good luck!
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