People spend time looking into the lives of their friends, reading posts and updates, looking at photos and feeling that they are ‘catching up’ with that friend, yet, people do not engage with that friend.

They do not pick up the phone to connect. Before than using Facebook to deepen the friendship, they observe their friends, rather than show them that they really care.

People are becoming more like voyeurs than active participants in each other’s lives. Facebook users are prone to depression and low self-esteem.

People feel lonely because the experience of looking at other people without the interaction or validation makes them feel rejected or ignored, or they just feel that their friends are not treating them like friends.

Yet they are doing the same to them by looking without interacting.

Internet addiction stimulates the same reward systems in the brain that heroin does.

And yes, excessive use of social media, or microblogging, has been qualified as internet addiction because it can cause people to experience legit withdrawl symptoms.

Vulnerable narcissists are more prone to social media overuse, qualifying vulnerable narcissists as those with a defensive sense of grandiosity that is associated with low self-esteem, shyness, hypersensitivity.

The tendency toward upward social comparison – which means comparing yourself to someone who seems to be better off than you – accounts for much of the negative impact of Facebook overuse on self-esteem.

These comparisons and assumptions are way off base because there is usually a lot more to a person’s life than what they let you see on Facebook.

People present the most positive aspects of their lives and personalities on social media. Scrolling through posts of acquaintances, it is easy to forget that social media does not tell the full story of their life.

The more you use Facebook, the happier you are when you give it up!