Social Media,
Loneliness, and Anxiety in Young People
Is there a role for social media in perpetuating
anxiety and loneliness?
Posted
Dec 15, 2016
Is there a role for social media in
perpetuating anxiety through
feelings of disconnection and loneliness? At first glance, social
networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter seem to be a
modern means of facilitating our connectedness with others, sharing activities
and news, and keeping in touch with friends both old and new. But new
technologies are usually a mixture of both good and bad, and modern social
media are no different.
First, loneliness appears to have a
reciprocal relationship with social
anxiety. Social anxiety is an anxiety problem where a person has an
excessive and unreasonable fear of social situations. Social anxiety is
known to facilitate loneliness; but loneliness also increases social anxiety
and feelings of paranoia,
and this may represent a cyclical process that is especially active in the
young and in our modern times may be mediated by the use of social media[1].
So how might social media be involved?
Loneliness in the young is largely a function of perceived friendship networks.
Effectively, feelings of loneliness increase the fewer friends that an
individual has. In the modern day, social media such as Facebook and Twitter
are a significant contributor to the friendship networks of young people, so
whether you perceive yourself to be a successful user of social media is likely
to have an impact on feelings of loneliness, anxiety, paranoia, and mental health generally.
The relatively modern phenomenon of
social media and its associated technology adds a new dimension to loneliness
and anxiety by offering the young person a way of directly quantifying
friendships, viewing the friendship networks of others for comparison, and
providing immediate information about social events. You can compare your own
popularity with that of your peers, and manage that adolescent ‘fear of missing
out’ (FOMO) by continually monitoring what’s going on socially. So it’s easy to
see how technology use can take the place of more traditional social
interaction and provide a yardstick for one’s popularity – or more
significantly, one’s feelings of loneliness and alienation.
There’s no shortage of evidence that
loneliness, social anxiety and social
isolation can cause excessive use of social networking sites in
young people. For example, a study of university students in the UK found that
real life social interaction was negatively associated with excessive use of
Twitter, and loneliness was a significant factor that mediated this
relationship[2], so
it’s clear that many people use social networking sites in general to relieve
themselves of their loneliness.
Social anxiety and the need for social
assurance are also associated with problematic use of Facebook to the point
where Facebook use can become an addiction[3], and has even been shown to activate the
same brain areas
as addictive drugs such
as cocaine[4]! This addiction poses a threat to
physical and psychological well-being and interferes with performance at
school or work, and staying away from Facebook is viewed by users as an act of
‘self-sacrifice’ or a ‘detoxification’. So the vicious cycle is that
loneliness and social anxiety generate use of social networking sites, but then
problematic addiction to these sites itself causes further forms of anxiety
and stress.
For instance, a study of 1,839 college
students by Reynol Junco at Lock Haven University in the US found that time
spent on Facebook was strongly and significantly negatively related to overall
grade point average (GPA), but it was only time spent socializing on Facebook
that had this negative relationship with school performance[5]. Using Facebook for collecting and
sharing information was positively predictive of GPA – suggesting that, like
most technologies, Facebook use can have some good as well as negative impacts.
This study provides no real insight into the direction of cause here: Do
lower grades lead to more Facebook use or does more Facebook use lead to lower
grades (or does something else influence both at the same time)? However, if
Facebook use is a genuine addiction that the user cannot easily control, it
takes little imagination to see that Facebook use when it has become
uncontrollable may be detrimental to academic performance.
Secondly, a study of college student
Facebook use by Jay Campisi and colleagues at Regis University in Colorado
found that almost all respondents experienced some form of Facebook-induced
stress and that this stress was directly associated with physical health
problems such as upper respiratory infections[6]. But what was interesting was that this
stress wasn’t a function of how small a respondent's social network was, but
how large it was – the larger the Facebook network, the greater the stress – so
a large network of friends on social networking sites may also be an added source
of stress to today’s young people.
The added stress and anxiety that large
cyber social networks bring has been well illustrated in a study by Julie
Morin-Major and colleagues at Harvard[7]. They found that after controlling for other relevant factors
such as sex,
age, time of awakening, perceived stress and perceived social support, the
larger your Facebook network, the greater your diurnal cortisol production. Higher
awakening cortisol levels are associated with chronic stress and worry, burnout,
and are a vulnerability factor for depression.
The authors of this study speculated that the number of Facebook friends you
have might be positive up to a point, and offer social reassurance and social
support, but after this optimum level is passed, this may switch social support
into social pressure and lead to increased stress and higher cortisol levels.
We’ve already seen that use of social
media can affect physical health and college or work performance, but just as
with any other forms of addiction, fear of not being able to use or access
social networking sites causes added distress – in this case caused by feelings
of social exclusion that would result from being unable to access these sites[8]. This is a significant sign of addiction
– for many of us, our social media is often the first thing we check in the
morning and the last thing we check before going to sleep!
Social media such as Facebook and Twitter provide constant updates which can
turn a mere interest in social networks into an unhealthy, stressful compulsion
that not only affects stress levels, but leads to feelings of inadequacy and
low self-esteem.
As empowering as our modern culture is, it’s also dangerous. Young people can
talk readily about their addiction to social media, but how candidly can they
talk about the anxieties that it generates?
A study of social isolation in America by
Miller McPherson and colleagues found that between 1984 and 2005, the
mean number of confidants a person had decreased from 2.94 to 2.08 – a
significant drop in what we would call “real friends”[9]. This is important, because as the
sociologist Eric Klinenberg pointed out, it’s the quality of your social
interactions, not the quantity, that defines loneliness[10]. This is something that older people are
aware of, and life seems to have taught them that a few quality friends are
more important than the quantity of connections in your friendship network.
Yet although connectedness has fallen
significantly over the past 40-50 years, we still have the compelling
evolutionary need to connect with other human beings. As John Cacioppo has
pointed out “forming connections with pets,
or online friends, or even with God, is a noble attempt by an obligatory
gregarious creature to satisfy a compelling need,” and this continuing
need in the face of creeping social isolation has coincided with the internet
providing us with an “army of replacement confidants” – none of whom are
confidants in the original meaning of the term.
In this sense, social media such as
Facebook have become surrogates for seeking connectedness, and as a consequence
our connections grow broader but shallower.[11] But our use of social media to chase connectedness may
merely make us feel more disconnected and lonelier. For example, feelings of
disconnectedness are associated with passive interactions with Facebook, such
as using it only to update your own activities or merely scanning the
activities of friends. If you log on to Facebook every day like more than half
of all Facebook users in the world do, and you use it in this passive way, it
will merely reinforce your feelings of disconnectedness.
What comes out of these findings about
the use of social networking sites is that loneliness and social anxiety do
indeed appear to facilitate use of these sites – often to the point of an
addiction, when there is an unhealthy desire to spend hours each day checking
these sites. However, even with a good sized social network on sites such as
Facebook and Twitter, there come added stressors and feelings of
disconnectedness, anxieties that can cause physical health problems and
negatively affect academic performance in the young. It’s fair to say that use
of social media by young people is not just a consequence of their social
anxieties, but causes additional anxieties and stresses that are all grist for
the modern-day anxiety epidemic.
References
[1] Lim M H, Rodebaugh T L, Zyphur M J
& Gleeson J F M (2016) Loneliness over time: The crucial role of social
anxiety. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 125, 620-630.
[2] Ndasauka Y, Hou J, Wang Y, Yang L
et al. (2016) Excessive use of Twitter among college students in the UK: Validation
of the Microblog Excessive Use Scale and relationship to social interaction and
loneliness. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, 963-971.
[3] Lee-Won R J, Herzog L & Gwan
Park S (2015) Hooked on Facebook: The role of social anxiety and need for
social assurance in problematic use of Facebook. Cyberpsychol. Behav. Soc.
Netw., 18, 567-574.
[4] Turel O, He Q, Xue G & Bechara
A (2014) Examination of neural systems sub-serving Facebook “addiction”.
Psychological Reports: Disability & Trauma, 115, 675-695.
[5] Junco R (2011) Too much face and
not enough books: the relationship between multiple indices of Facebook use and
academic performance. Computers in Human Behavior
[6] Campisi J, Bynog P, McGehee H,
Oakland J C et al. (2012) Facebook, stress, and incidence of upper respiratory
infection in undergraduate college students. Cyberpsychol. Behav. Soc. Netw.,
15, 675-681.
[7] Morin-Major J K, Marin M-F, Durand
N, Wan N et al. (2016) Facebook behaviors associated with diurnal cortisol in
adolescents: Is befriending stressful? Psychoneuroendocrinology, 63, 238-246.
[8] Chiou W-B, Lee C-C & Liao D-C
(2015) Facebook effects on social distress: Priming with online social
networking thoughts can alter the perceived distress due to social exclusion.
Computers in Human Behavior, 49, 230-236.
[9] McPherson M, Smith-Lovin L &
Brashears M E (2006) Social isolation in America: Changes in core discussion
networks over two decades. American Sociological Review, 7, 353-375.
[10] Klinenberg E (2013) Going solo:
The extraordinary rise and surprising appeal of living alone. Penguin Books.
[11] Marche S (2012) Is Facebook making
us lonely?
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/308930/
