If you find yourself passively scrolling on various social media apps like Instagram or Twitter, it is better to stop. Recent studies have found that people, who scroll on social media apps continuously consume content in the form of photos or videos to chase the short term dopamine spike, are more likely to suffer from anxiety, stress, and depression. Even more, than the people who post their own content.

In order to better understand the association between different social media engagement habits, feelings of loneliness, and psychological distress, researchers questioned 288 people between the ages of 18 and 34 for the study that was published in the journal Behaviour & Information Technology.

Three distinct uses of social media were examined in the study. This included active non-social, where users submitted their own content but did not connect with other users, passive, where users just browsed content created by other users, and active social, where users uploaded their own content and engaged with other users and their content.

In the study, researchers found that people scrolling social media passively were linked to elevated levels of stress, depression, and anxiety and interestingly, people who created and shared their own content had a positive impact on their stress levels.

Constantina Panourgia, corresponding author of the paper, said in a statement, “This finding highlights the positive aspects of active non-social media use, such as public content sharing, that allows users to receive feedback, such as likes and positive comments to their posts, but without the demands of direct social interactions."

This is not the first time that social media has been linked to multiple mental health problems. As people start consuming more and more content mindlessly on social media, stress, depression, and anxiety levels have risen exponentially. So much so that people feel like a need to take a detox from social media, a detox to break themselves from the cycle of constant comparison to strangers on the internet and to actually live life as it is supposed to be. It is high time that people realize that social media, which was created to connect people, is on its way to becoming a liability in the lives of people.