A new study was released in April that looked at the effect of deactivating FaceBook or Instagram from your phone and I have to say, the results were incredibly impressive. Here’s the money quote. “People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls.”
So a control group was asked to deactivate the apps for one week while the study group deactivated for 6 weeks and Facebook saw a 6% improvement over the standard deviation and Instagram users saw a 4% improvement in happiness, levels of depression and anxiety. There are SSRI’s that don’t see that level of improvement!
A few caveats before we break down the numbers, this study was done in the leadup to the 2020 election and if you recall, that was an absolutely crazy time in this country. Lockdowns were in effect in most of the blue states, we were in the middle of “the most important election of our lives” (until the next one) a lot of people were spending a giant chunk of time doomscrolling social media. Depression and anxiety levels were at an all-time high so some of these numbers might be skewed by the reality of what was happening at the time.
However, even with all those caveats, these numbers are really eye-popping and give even more credence to the theory that our social media algorithms are engineered to make us more anxious and angry because that’s what keeps us coming back and scrolling. Our phones have been compared to adult pacifiers but pacifiers are meant to pacify, our phones are constant irritants that annoy and enrage, taking our time and emotional health to put money in the hands of our tech overlords.
I remember reading the book Salt, Sugar, Fat years ago and learning how the large food companies were engineering our food to make it more addictive and being so upset that these forces I didn’t understand or even know about at the time were endangering the health of the nation in order to maximize profits and it is becoming ever more clear that the social media companies are doing the same.
It’s frustrating as someone who has spent the last decade or so trying desperately to fix so many aspects of my health to keep coming back to the fact that virtually every major force in our culture is working against me. From the food in our grocery stores to the phone in our pockets, we have to constantly be vigilant and keep an eye on the influences in our lives that make big money if we are sick, tired, and unhealthy.
One other fact to note about this study is that there was an age and gender breakdown. Men over 35 saw more benefit to deleting Facebook, Women under 25 saw more benefit to deleting Instagram. I’m not totally sure what to make of that but I thought it was interesting.
