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What Is Social Media Anxiety Disorder? The Effects Of Social Anxiety Online

 

If you have been living under a rock for the past few years, we now live in a society where real human interaction is quickly becoming something in our past.

 

The days of being in groups of people for social reasons is not completely dead, but it doesn’t look like it will be around much longer.

 

A recent study was taken to see what the effects social media had on depression and anxiety, and it isn’t as bad as you may have thought. In a recent report at GoodTherapy.org some of the findings of this social media experiment are very interesting.

 

Brian A. Feinstein of the Department of Psychology at Stony Brook University in New York recently led a study that examined how young adults’ levels of depressive or anxious symptoms impacted their social media usage.

He also looked at how the usage of social media affected the symptoms of depression and anxiety in the same sample of 301 young adults over a period of 3 weeks. Feinstein found that social media usage was not directly affected by increases in either anxious or depressive symptoms. But increases in depression did result in negative social media experiences, which led to decreases in positive affect.

Additionally, participants with symptoms of depression at week 1 were more likely to have bad relationship interactions with their loved ones and friends at week 3 than participants with no depressive symptoms.

So basically this finding by Brian A. Feinstein suggests that when people are overly depressed or anxious, their social media habits don’t really change all that much. People still need to feel some kind of connection to other humans no matter what their mood may be, even if anxiety is ruining their day.

This is encouraging because there is nothing that is going to make anxiety and depression worse than hiding in a house and refusing to talk to all other living beings. It is noted however that when a person is depressed, their social experience may not be as happy as it normally would, which again…makes perfect sense.

And as you would guess, those who started depressed would indeed end the study depressed..no big news there.

The study revealed different results for the participants with anxiety. Specifically, increases in social anxiety did not lead to maladaptive social media usage but did increase feelings of general anxiety pertaining to relationships with loved ones.

These findings suggest that individuals deal with the social and relational stress of anxiety differently than they do with the stress resulting from depression.

In kind of a surprising note, those people in the study who were anxious but not depressed didn’t really have a bad social media experience, they instead just felt extra anxious which again is not surprising.

Depression can cause anxiety and anxiety can cause depression, but it’s important to not confuse the two. Although they are both very troublesome for the unlucky ones who have to suffer in their private hell with each disorder, the characteristics are just not the same at times.

It doesn’t matter if you are suffering from depression or anxiety, what is important is that you don’t lock yourself in a room to try to “beat” the disorder. There is no good that comes from hiding and pretending it doesn’t exist. While these disorders may be really hard to get past, it is very possible to do and it would be a lot harder in a dark room with the shades drawn.

 

via anxietyreliefzone.com