Anxiety and Social Media Essay Example

The rapid and dramatic technological advancements have changed the way people communicate with one another due to the availability of a range of social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, as well as Instagram. The social media is beneficial to its users as it improves their psychological well-being, which consequently boosts the quality of their lives. Notwithstanding the benefits that social media brings forth, its excessive use may lead to some detrimental consequences. These include a decline in academic achievement and performance, and poor quality of sleep. The emotional effects may also be undesirable as social media leads to depressive disorders and anxiety (Liu & Ma, 2018).

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In this article, there is adequate evidence to show that when individuals use social media excessively, the outcome is social media burnout (Liu & Ma, 2018). As such, social media companies that aim at realizing rapid growth in the competitive environment should alleviate the symptom of burnout to enable them to attract many users, which will eventually be beneficial to the organization. The characteristic feature of social media burnout or fatigue is the reduced interest in logging on the sites (Liu & Ma, 2018). Some users may even be eager to get away from social media platforms. Envy and anxiety in the use of social media act as mediators. Ideally, the social comparison between individuals that arises from the feelings of envy may lead to psychological distress and depression.

Concisely, to gain a proper understanding of the relationship between envy and anxiety in social media use, addiction scale was used to assess university students from Chongqing University. The participants had relevant knowledge and experience to use social media like QQ and WeChat. Out of 530 participants who took part in the study, only data obtained from 519 students were used as eleven students did not provide adequate information (Liu & Ma, 2018). From the social media addiction scale, the highest score showed the highest level of addiction to social media sites. Envy scale was used to establish the level of envy that social media users experience when using such sites. Burnout scale was also used to show the level of burnout due to social media use. The scale was based on the subscales of emotional exhaustion, ambivalence, as well as depression. Notably, to confirm whether the questionnaires had some common biases, principal component and factor analyses were applied. These demonstrated that the questionnaires did not have any significant issue with the method biases.

The article, based on the study conducted, clearly sets out that addiction to social media leads to social media burnout. Therefore, the higher the rate at which individuals are addicted to social media, the heavier the symptoms of burnout become (Liu & Ma, 2018). Additionally, anxiety and envy when using social media mediate the association significantly. As the time spent by various people on the platform of social media increases, the individuals are more likely to access large amounts of information thereby leading to information overload. Consequently, the overload will lead to fatigue and eagerness to quit the platforms.

Conclusion

Envy and anxiety are the mediators of the association between addiction to social media and burnout. Therefore, it indicates that excessive social media use leads to increased envy levels, which induce feelings of anxiety intensely. When anxiety is induced, the risk of experiencing the symptoms of burnout will also increase. In such cases, individuals will reduce or even curb their use of social media.

Reference

Liu, C., & Ma, J. (2018). Social media addiction and burnout: The mediating roles of envy and social media use anxiety. Current Psychology, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-9998-0