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Your Facebook Friends Could Be Making You Depressed

But it depends how you interact with them.

Your Facebook Friends Could Be Making You Depressed
David Dettmann/Netflix

There's plenty of debate over whether social media is good or bad for your mental health. As with most things, the consensus seems to be that its effect on you all depends on how you engage with it. But one way of using it is pretty unequivocally destructive: comparing yourself to your friends.

For a new Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking review, Lancaster University researchers analyzed 30 studies of 35,000 people in 14 countries on depression and social networking sites. They found that the relationship between these two things varied widely, but one clear pattern emerged: When people were comparing themselves to their online friends, they were more depressed.

It might seem obvious that comparing yourself to other people is going to lead you down a rabbit hole of self-doubt, but what makes these findings extra interesting is that this effect is even stronger over the internet.

"We found that comparing yourself with people on social media was more likely to make you feel depressed than comparing yourself offline," lead author David Baker told Broadly.

Another factor that correlated with depression was letting your virtual life spill over into your real life, Baker added. "If you log on and see something and you're still thinking about it afterwards, that can make you become depressed."

Other research has found that social media can get in the way of couples' relationships—especially if one person is a selfie-taker—and make it harder to get over an ex.

While it's difficult to say whether certain uses of social media cause depression or whether depressed people are more likely to engage in them in the first place, another recent study suggests it's at least partially the former. Participants who took a break from Facebook were happier and more satisfied with their lives than those who didn't.

All in all, seems like easing up on your social media consumption might be a good self-care tip. And if that sounds like an impossible task, at least now you know there are ways to use it more wisely.