Danish scientists say that your life satisfaction could rise significantly if you go cold turkey from Facebook for a week. For their study, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute, Meik Wiking and his colleagues used Facebook users from Denmark. They split 1,095 daily Facebook users into two groups, half given access to the site as normal and the remainder forced to quit Facebook for a week. The study showed those who were on a break for a week from the social network were happy and more satisfied with their life. The study also noted that lower levels of happiness is associated with Facebook due to envy of other people’s lives. “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 Wiking. They also found that the group that took a break from Facebook were less angry, more enthusiastic, and also 55% less stressed. Their social activities were also on the rise. According to the researchers, the reason behind this is because Facebook highlights the best of peoples’ lives. “Facebook is a constant bombardment of everyone else’s great news, but many of us look out of the window and see grey skies and rain (especially in Denmark!),” said Wiking. “This makes the Facebook world, where everyone’s showing their best side, seem even more distortedly bright by contrast, so we wanted to see what happened when users took a break.” Having said that, while the results are based on self-reported answers, researchers found a connection between quitting Facebook and happiness. It just not a causal relationship, there could be something to it. The next step for researchers is to further investigate whether the positive feeling participants felt after quitting Facebook could last more than a week, and what happens when these users go without Facebook for extended periods. “I’d like to try for a year,” said Wiking, “but we’d have to see how many volunteers we get for that.”
