Facebook More Addictive Than Cigarettes, Study Says

Forget the Marlboro Reds and whiskey, what you’re developing the biggest dependency on might not be chemical at all: it’s social media. According to a study from ChicagoUniversity, texting and checking Facebook and Twitter come in just below sex and sleep on impossible to resist urges.

Subjects 18-85 were given blackberries and sent out into the wild, and then the researchers messaged them to see if they were feeling urges to check social media: they found that almost all the time, they were experiencing a powerful desire. Of course, the constant Blackberry interaction with reserachers seems to have become a sort of social media of its own.

“Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success,” lead researcher Wilhelm Hofmann, told The Guardian. But according to the paper, checking these devices is as much about the desire to work as it is to relax.

“Resisting the desire to work was likewise prone to fail. In contrast, people were relatively successful at resisting sports inclinations, sexual urges, and spending impulses, which seems surprising given the salience in modern culture of disastrous failures to control sexual impulses and urges to spend money.”

It’s a feeling we’re all familiar with — that we’ll just sign on, check Facebook, check Twitter, see what’s there. The little buildup of tension when the loading screen starts to go, the little release when it jumps and the page loads. It’s a quick, easy fix unlikely to give you liver disease or lung cancer, one of the reasons that the addiction may be so much more pervasive than traditionally harmful pastimes.

“With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one. So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still ‘steal’ a lot of people’s time,” said Hoffman.

There’s also the argument to be made that social media is just as harmful, forcing someone to recede from the world and into a safe little bubble of status updates and tweets, where human beings aren’t troublesome animals but easily compartmentalized profiles. But it’s a little easier to make the harm argument with cigarettes.

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