Women stress less on social media

Contrary to popular belief, women deal better with stress by being ative on social media sites.

Contrary to popular belief, women deal better with stress by being ative on social media sites.

Published Jan 20, 2015

Share

Washington – It’s become almost common knowledge that being constantly connected makes us unhappy, particularly when it comes to being inundated with social media posts.

But before you decide that limiting your Facebook posts or Twitter messages is the answer, we have news for you: active social media use can actually lower stress levels – at least for women.

That’s the finding from a study published last week by the Pew Research Centre’s internet and American life project.

Heading into the study, researchers assumed it would show that high social media use leads to higher stress levels overall. “We thought it would prove that bit of conventional wisdom,” said Lee Rainie, the research group’s director. “Instead, it pushes against it.”

Three things made this study stand out, said Keith Hampton, a Rutgers University communications professor and the paper’s lead author:

1 Social media provide what Hampton calls “supportive exchange”. People feel less stressed because they can stay in contact with friends and family, and feel supported.

2 Women tend to be, in Hampton’s words, the people tasked with “maintaining household family relationships”. So when it comes to social media, the technology may be helping them fulfil those tasks more efficiently.

3 Women are more likely to be active sharers than men.

And posting a quick photo on Instagram or update on Facebook is a low-cost, easy way to do that.

The lowered stress levels were most pronounced in women who used social media a lot, Hampton said. Stress levels were 21 percent lower in women who had higher than “average” social media use.

The survey sampled about 1 800 American adults in 2013. It asked participants about their social media use, overall level of technology use and questions to measure participants’ stress levels.

Hampton said there was one scenario in which heavy social media users might see their stress levels spike as a result of their social media use: if bad things happened to the people closest to them.

Social media users in general are far more likely to know about friends’ major life events than non-social media users; generally, women are more likely to know about those situations than men. When friends and family are sharing good or neutral news, a woman who uses a lot of social media still gets the lowered stress benefits. But if her sister or best friend ends up going through a rough patch because of a lost job or illness, those posts can lead to a spike in her own stress.

That’s hardly the fault of the technology, even if social media make it easier for misery to find company, Hampton said. “It’s not that Facebook is making bad things happen in people’s lives,” he said.

It’s likely that venting about the bad things in her life on social media makes a woman feel better, while raising the stress levels of the women near and dear to her – what Hampton and Rainie term the “cost of caring”.

Still, there’s a limit even to how much empathetic women get affected by negative posts. Bad things happening to friends and family will make you blue. But if it happens to an acquaintance, reading about bad things can actually send individuals’ stress levels down.

That sounds a bit callous, but Hampton said that seeing distant catastrophes can help women get their own priorities in order.

“It’s a sort of joy of missing out,” he said.

“There’s something about this awareness that can make you grateful that this isn’t happening to you.”

Washington Post-Bloomberg

Related Topics: