Social Media Stress Leads to Online Addiction

Regular use of social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook may cause an enormous quantity of stress, which researchers say can fuel addiction to the websites.

The platforms are known for producing a negative psychological link between its users and the introduction of new technologies called 'technostress'.

When faced with technostress, instead of switching off or using them less, people just flip to another social media activities such as browsing the news feed, messaging, etc.

This vicious circle raises the risk of becoming addicted to platforms.

“Two different principles”

IT and management expert Monideepa Tarafdar of the Lancaster University and colleagues analyzed the habits of 444 Facebook users.

They examined various forms of technostress that can be caused by using social media including, the feeling that the sites were invading users' lives, that users were receiving too much information and that the site was always changing.

The team also explored two different principle approaches to handle stress.

The first involved users that sought persions from social media itself such as through logging out of Facebook, spending less time on the platform or discussing the sources of their stress with friends or family.

The other principle, which the researchers found was more common among frequent Facebook users, involved persion through different activities within the same social network platform.

“Findings”

“We found that those users who had a greater social media habit needed less effort to find another aspect of the platforms,” noted paper co-author Sven Laumer of the "Dr. Theo and Friedl Schöller" Research Center.

“Users go to different areas of the platform which they see as being separate and that they use in different ways,” he added.

“With Facebook, there are features that take you into different worlds within the same platform.'”

“The idea of using the same environment that is causing the stress as a means of coping with that stress is novel,” concluded Professor Tarafdar.

The study was published in the Information Systems Journal.