Nowadays, when smartphones have become a necessity, social media is a subject that almost everyone is involved in. Sometimes we just watch kitten videos on Instagram, and sometimes we participate in heated and exaggerated discussions on Twitter. Although we are on social media to “distract”, studies have shown that social media negatively affects the mental health of users.
Hannah Jarman and her team, from La Trobe University in Australia, revealed in their research that social media has devastating effects on individuals. Let’s take a look at how social media platforms affect us so much.
In the research article, the effects of social media, which is called “well-being” in English and which means “well-being” in our language, are mentioned. Well-being means both physical and mental health and happiness of the person. Throughout the article, we will refer to the term well-being as “happiness” for easy understanding.
Data collected from 7000 volunteers in the 4-year study
Jarman and his team studied over 7,000 young adults and adults during their 4 years of in-depth research. Volunteers, who were frequently observed and participated in surveys in the company of expert psychologists, used social media platforms at their own will for 4 years without being exposed to any external force.
As a result of the research, it was revealed that happiness and mental health are directly linked to social media use. It has been revealed that users who compare their own lives with what they see on social media platforms cannot enjoy life, become depressed and even start to become asocial.
A dangerous cycle is forming
In the research, it was revealed that social media users were happy at first, but then they saw the lives of famous people on social media and compared this “shiny life” with their own lives. Volunteers, who later became depressed, start to spend more time on social media, which further depresses their morale.
As such, the use of social media and the deterioration of mental health enters a vicious circle. The more users use social media, the more pessimistic they become, and the more pessimistic they become, the more they increase the use of social media instead of socializing. In the research, users who used social media for 2-3 hours a day at first started to spend time on social media between 8 and 10 hours a day in the last periods of the experiment. While 70% of the 7,000 volunteers fell into this vicious circle, the remaining 30% have either reduced their use of social media or stopped altogether.
So how can you avoid this situation?
Researchers and expert psychologists stated that getting out of this vicious circle is difficult, but not impossible. Stating that the most important point here is to increase the use of social media, experts state that you should not let social media take the place of your social activities. It is recommended that the content producers you see on social media and people who see and emulate the lives of celebrities should be motivated to have a similar life and work in this direction, instead of having such pessimistic thoughts.
If you have such pessimistic thoughts, the best thing you can do is to try to reduce the use of social media and get psychological support.
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