Social media exhaustion or fatigue is a growing issue among social media users. It happens when people use social media too much and feel overwhelmed. Many experts from different fields, like psychology, communication, and information science, have studied this problem. Social media fatigue can harm a person’s work and academic performance and even their mental health. What leads to SM fatigue and potentially causes users to abandon SM altogether?
In this study, the authors wanted to discover the drivers of SM fatigue and how it affects whether people quit social media. They included 64 studies with more than 28,000 participants. They studied seven psychological drivers or stressors, one behavioral driver, and four environmental drivers that can cause SM fatigue.
Out of these 12 drivers or stressors, information overload, social overload, too many features of SM, and feeling anxious when using SM had the biggest impact on social media fatigue. To a lesser extent, being addicted to social media influenced fatigue. There were smaller connections between finding social media useful and effective and feeling tired of it. Feeling exhausted from social media had a medium-to-large effect on quitting SM altogether. Gender and education level also played a role: women and people without a college degree were more likely to feel social media fatigue.
The authors explained, “social media allows people to be connected anywhere and anytime, makes them extensively exposed to information, and forces them to deal with unwanted social interactions” (p. 21). This can be challenging. When examining the features of specific SM platforms, like Facebook, information overload is readily apparent. This overload includes “communication requests, commercial messages, ads, spam, and others’ selfies” and “users may feel anxious when their lives are invaded and disturbed by such endless, unwanted messages from these platforms” (p. 22).
In summary, even though many people find social media helpful, some things about it can lead to fatigue and eventual discontinued use. Feeling overwhelmed by social interactions, too much information, or complex features can lead to social media fatigue. What about people who are addicted to social media? Does feeling exhausted from it make them stop using it? The authors explained, “Individuals who are heavily addicted to social media are unlikely to withdraw from their use of social media directly, except when they perceive a sense of fatigue derived from such excessive use” (p. 24). To avoid SM fatigue, users should monitor their use, take breaks from SM, and ponder how they feel during and after exposure to SM.
In a previous post, I reviewed questions about SM that have been answered in published research. You can access that post here.
Citation: Ou, M., Zheng, H., Kim, H. K., & Chen, x. (2023). A meta-analysis of social media fatigue: Drivers and a major consequence. Computers in Human Behavior, 140, 107597. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2022.107597
©Jennie Dilworth, Ph.D