The burden of online friends: The effects of giving up Facebook on stress and well-being

ABSTRACT

People occasionally choose to cut themselves off from their online social network by taking extended breaks from Facebook. This study investigated whether abstaining from Facebook reduces stress but also reduces subjective well-being because of the resulting social disconnection. Participants (138 active Facebook users) were assigned to either a condition in which they were instructed to give up Facebook for 5 days or continue to use Facebook as normal. Perceived stress and well-being, as well as salivary cortisol, were measured before and after the test period. Relative to those in the Facebook Normal condition, those in the No Facebook condition experienced lower levels of cortisol and life satisfaction. Our results suggest that the typical Facebook user may occasionally find the large amount of social information available to be taxing, and Facebook vacations could ameliorate this stress—at least in the short term.

KEYWORDS:

• cortisol
• Facebook
• social networks
• stress
• well-being

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Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/grh8s/

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/grh8s/

Notes

1. After this study was completed, and while we were preparing the manuscript, Tromholt (2016) published a similar experimental study, in which participants were randomly assigned to a control or no Facebook group for one week. We address this study in the Discussion.

2. The unequal numbers of the two conditions was simply due to true random assignment.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP1301100759].