Facebook Makes Us.. Sad?

A new study shows that Facebook may actually be making us unhappy.

It's odd to think that Facebook could possibly be making us unhappy, when most of us tend to go on it to pass time or entertain ourselves to do the opposite effect—to make up happy. We all want to go on, look at pictures of our family members, see cute videos of puppies, etc.

How could that possibly make us sad?

The University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross, who conducted the study, argues that that’s exactly how it makes us feel. Over two weeks, Kross and his colleagues sent text messages to eighty-two Ann Arbor residents five times per day.

The researchers wanted to know a couple things, such as how their subjects felt overall, how worried and lonely they were, how much they had used Facebook, and how often they had had direct interaction with others since the previous text message.

Kross found that the more people used Facebook in the time between the two texts, the less happy they felt—and the more their overall satisfaction declined from the beginning of the study until its end. The data, he argues, shows that Facebook was making them unhappy.

Perhaps we might be better off staying off of Facebook and focusing more on living in the moment.