Facebook and Mental Health: More Connected, Less Fulfilled

How can the 500 million people who use Facebook on a daily basis be wrong? Why would so many people use social media if it didn’t do something positive for their lives?

And yet a just-published study in the journal PloS One suggests that we might want to think twice about going online to update others about our lives or find out about what they are up to in theirs. It appears that the more often we give in to this urge (or temptation, for many of us), the less happy we are likely to be on a moment-by-moment basis and the less satisfied we are likely to be with our lives in general.

To arrive at this conclusion, researchers randomly text-messaged people five times per day over two weeks, asking each time how they felt at that moment and how satisfied they were with their lives. The researchers found that the more people used Facebook at one time point, the worse they felt the next time they were text-messaged. In addition, the more they used Facebook over the two-week study period, the less satisfied they were with their lives at the end of this time.

To help address the possibility that the findings merely reflect the fact that unhappy people are more likely to use Facebook, the investigators controlled for loneliness, depression, and a host of other factors. They found that these alternative possibilities did not explain the data as well as the more straightforward conclusion that increasing use of Facebook produces increasing unhappiness.

These findings have potential clinical implications as we think about how to counsel our patients regarding their use of social media (i.e., not the best activity perhaps for people struggling with depression). But I believe this study carries a far more important, and ominous, message of direct relevance to human well-being.

Facebook shares in common with many other innovations in the modern world an ability to short-circuit the effort involved in achieving rewards we are hard-wired by evolutionary processes to seek. As social animals, we crave interpersonal connection. As tribal animals, we especially crave a sense of status and belonging with those we identify as “our people.” In the modern world, the closest we can come to being in a tribe is to identify with those we grew up with or who share our deepest markers of identity (i.e., religious affiliation, political party, occupation).

In the old days (say the year 2000!), we could only make these connections through significant effort. We had to call people on the phone and speak with them. If we wanted to reconnect with our old high school buddies, we had to wait ten years and go to a reunion. And reunions are notoriously painful events for many people. In short, if we wanted to be connected with people, we had to go out and connect with them, using most of the same strategies that have been in play for at least a million years in hominids.

Facebook mainlines a sense of instant connection with, and knowledge about, others, especially all those folks we want to impress from high school. All of a sudden, you know all you think you’d ever want to know about people you hadn’t thought about in 30 years. Minimal effort required.

Here is the crucial point: Like Facebook, every other addictive and depressogenic aspect of modern life also shortcuts the effort we are designed by evolution to invest to achieve the pay-off. Drugs of abuse directly activate striatal brain regions evolved to provide pleasure as a reward for accomplishing activities that enhance survival and reproduction (i.e., sex).  Processed foods instantly provide chemicals that once were rare and treasured foraging discoveries in the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Escalators, elevators, cars, and planes transport us across distances that once would have required significant physical exercise to cross. I could extend this list almost indefinitely.

What is remarkable is that all these effort-saving innovations (and a whole raft of other such innovations I haven’t mentioned) are depressogenic or contribute to conditions such as a sedentary lifestyle and/or obesity, which are depressogenic.

We are programmed to look at life in terms of results and outcomes, so it is natural for us to strive to achieve maximally successful results with minimal effort. But the sad paradox is that it may be the process by which we achieve our results that provides more of what makes life worth living than the results themselves.

This perspective, which I believe is increasingly supported by findings from evolutionary biology and psychology, has many important implications for how we address a range of psychiatric conditions characterized by depression, anxiety, and a sense of personal emptiness. Finding ways to voluntarily re-insert some of our old ways of getting things done is not backward-looking. I would argue, rather, that reincorporating some of the ancient processes that bring happiness and fulfillment, and better blending these with our constant quest for successful outcomes, is akin to discovering the best fuel for the human machine. Finding and refining these fuels is especially relevant now to help us survive the race track of the modern world.

Do you advise your patients to follow any particular social media strategy? 

Charles L. Raison, MD, is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine and the Barry and Janet Lang Associate Professor of Integrative Mental Health in the Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. He is also the behavioral health expert for CNN.com, and he is a Psych Congress Steering Committee member.

The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the blog post author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Psych Congress Network or other Psych Congress Network authors.