Sarah Mitroff
You do it in the morning in bed, at night on the couch, and occasionally at work. Turns out, it’s one of the hardest activities to resist. It’s not smoking a cigarette or having sex; it’s getting online to check your Facebook or e-mail. A new study shows that resisting the urges to update your status or send a tweet can be harder to resist than the desire to get it on.
Wilhelm Hofmann, assistant professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago, conducted a study of 205 participants in Germany 18 years and older on how easy it is to resist common desires. Each person was given a BlackBerry phone and told to alert the researchers every 30 minutes if they had specific desires to sleep, eat, have sex, smoke, drink, or surf the web.
The No. 1 desire reported was eating, followed by sleeping, and drinking non-alcoholic drinks. In fourth place was using some form of media, which made up 8.1 percent of all desires reported. The most commonly reported media activities were watching TV and surfing the internet. More specifically, in the “surfing the internet” category, 71 percent of participants had the urge to check their e-mail and 65 percent had the desire to use Facebook, Twitter or other social media. Having was sex a distant ninth.
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