Twitter may reduce stress, surprised researchers say

SALT LAKE CITY — After Natalie Clemens' second son was born, she took to Facebook as a way to connect with others when she felt "shut in" with her new baby.

Since then she worked for a time as a social media specialist, and now maintains a weekly blog and is active on Facebook.

"It does make me feel like I have a support network," she said.

Clemens isn't alone. Women who frequently use social media — specifically Twitter, email and sharing pictures on their cellphones — report lower stress levels than those who do not, according to a study released Thursday by the Pew Internet Research Project.

"Everything about these findings was a surprise," said Lee Rainie, director of Internet, science and technology research at Pew Research Center and one of the study's authors. "The widespread supposition was the more you use (social media), the more anxious you become. And in fact, particularly in the case of women, the more that they used technology, the more they were less likely to feel stress."

Social media use did have a drawback for women: Social media increased their awareness of stress in others' lives, which in turn increased their own stress levels at those times. Study authors said this is similar to finding out about stressful events in people's lives offline.

"(Stressful events) aren’t things that you can control, and they’re going to happen regardless of your use of technology," said Keith Hampton, one of the study's authors. "What we’re finding is that there are a lot of real social benefits and a lot of personal benefits to the use of these technologies.”

The study measured men's and women's stress levels separately and did not find a statistically significant difference in stress between men who used social media, cellphones or the Internet and those who did not. In other words, the men in the study seemed to be unaffected by their use of technology and social media.

Researchers used the Perceived Stress Scale, a non-diagnostic measure of stress-related psychological or physical illness, to gauge stress levels. Women's stress levels on the Perceived Stress Scale were 7 percent higher than men's, but those who reported more social media use also reported lower stress levels.

"In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense," Hampton said. "There’s something about social sharing that’s really important."

Pew's findings were good news for Chris Thomas, president of Intrepid, a Salt Lake City-based agency that provides communication strategies for its clients.

"As society has changed in the past five to 10 years, social media has become such an important vehicle for communicating a message," he said. "You can’t underestimate its importance in communicating."

The new study allows him to target messaging to women, who he said make or influence many decisions being made with discretionary income.

"To see that benefit of it being a stress reliever makes it even a more interesting tool as it relates to targeting that demographic,” he said.

Social media users often feel a greater sense of social support, are more politically engaged and have more social capital, in part because social media links them to others, Hampton said.

"Social media users are more aware because they have this extra level of connectivity. Sometimes we kind of question whether those little tidbits of information that are flowing through Facebook … whether that amounts to anything or not because it’s such a small bit of information," he said.

"It does really seem that those little bits do add up to kind of a big block of something, and that big block of something is increased awareness."

The study also indicated that small, mundane social media interactions can ultimately create a meaningful connection.

"One of the striking things about this is that the modest little tiny investments that people are putting into the sharing and the access to information about it seems to have a social payoff," Rainie said.

To read the study, visit pewinternet.org.

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