Quitting Facebook can make people happier in life, a new study conducted by Denmark-based Happiness Research Institute suggests.
For the purpose of the study, the researchers enrolled 1,095 volunteers between the ages of 16 and 76. Ninety-four percent of the participants said they visited Facebook as part of their daily routine.
The participants were divided into two groups. While half of them were asked to quit Facebook, the remaining were allowed to use the social networking site as normal.
At the end of the week, the participants were asked to evaluate their life satisfaction on a scale of one to ten both before and after the one-week experiment. The results showed that 88 percent of the participants who had quit Facebook said they felt "happy", while 81 percent of those who continued using the social network felt the same, reported TechTimes.
It was found that the group, which had quit Facebook, enjoyed life more, was less angry, less lonely and more enthusiastic. The participants said they found it easier to concentrate, and that quitting the social network enabled them to spend more time seeing friends and family face-to-face, according to Belfast Telegraph.
"After a few days, I noticed my to-do list was getting done faster than normal as I spent my time more productively. I also felt a sort of calmness from not being confronted by Facebook all the time," said 35-year-old volunteer Sophie Anne Dornoy.
The researchers claimed that the lower levels of happiness are associated with Facebook for the sole reason that people tend to compare their life with other people's lives.
"Instead of focusing on what we actually need, we have an unfortunate tendency to focus on what other people have," noted the study authors.
Commenting on the study results, Meik Wiking, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, said, "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."
"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."
Wiking said that despite the study's results, majority of the people will continue to use social media as usual because humans have a tendency to repeat negative behavior.
"It's also common wisdom that smoking is bad, yet we continue to do it," Wiking added.
