Why Facebook is so addictive | A simple scientific fact

In 2010, i have created a Facebook account only because of my friend’s insistence. But from that moment, it has became my virtual companion. I don’t know why, i didn’t search for that reason too. But when it became an unavoidable thing in my life, i started to think about it!!

Image courtesy : http://www.geekrepublic.org/

I have read some articles on web about it, but couldn’t end up in a scientific conclusion. But when i started to search about drug addiction, i have found a hormone called Dopamine. I think most of them have heard about it, and this hormone is responsible for reward-motivated behavior in our brain. It get activated when we get a reward or positive | motivational comments from others. This same hormone is produced in excess when people start consuming drugs like cocaine and heroin. The excess dopamine can give you more motivational, positive feelings; but after a consistent usage, our brain will assume the excess dopamine level as normal. So if the drug user didn’t consume enough drug, brain will request to produce more dopamine and user can’t stop consuming the drug consumption.

Dopamine is released in various scenarios too, but when we think about this hormone and it’s connection with Facebook addiction, we can arrived in one conclusion. The Facebook Likes and comments is a kind of rewards to our brain. If someone gets more Likes , their brain will start to produce more Dopamine. Like a drug, it will slowly leads to a dopamine addiction and we can’t live without it. This may be the reason why Facebook didn’t include a Dislike button. So Facebook is always designed for positive motivational feelings. It can also become a platform for envy and jealous, because people can be distracted by seeing other’s achievements and they will try harder to show their achievements in their profiles too, for satisfying the brain dopamine level.

Image courtesy : http://static.topnettools.com/

In short Facebook is working like a drug, which can’t be avoided in our daily life. More Likes and positive comments make us happy and if someone post negative comments in our profile, there is a big chance to block that person :)

This addiction is also happening in all kind of social network like Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn etc

I don’t know what will be the future of our virtual social life. Let’s hope for the best !!

Note : This post just a scientific conclusion of the author without doing any case studies. He can’t guarantee it’s authenticity.