GirlsGuideTo | OMG: Women More Likely to Be Addicted to Facebook, Says Science

So really, it’s not your fault you stalked your ex after your night out last night! Just blame the science…Despite the fact that the internet has only been around for about a generation, internet addiction may be genetic. Dr Christian Montag from the University of Bonn, said they had found a gene in people who could not drag themselves away. Most were women.

He and colleagues drew their conclusions after interviewing more than 800 people about their internet habits, including how often they thought about it and how much of an impact they felt if it was denied to them.

They then looked at the genetic makeup of 132 who seemed most addicted to the net, comparing them to a 'healthy' control group. They found that many of the 132 had the same genetic variant, which has previously been linked to nicotine addiction.

Dr. Christian Montag, said that subjects in the study who exhibited "problematic internet behavior" tended to be women and that "the sex-specific genetic finding may result from a specific subgroup of internet dependency, such as the use of social networks" like Facebook and Twitter. So all those pictures of people's meals and status updates about how they're at the gym or how much they love their moms? They're not merely unimportant, annoying details about someone's boring life—they're a symptom of a larger problem.

Our verdict: OMG. I didn’t know people could be addicted to the internet. But clearly, it’s a problem if science needed to tackle this pressing issue. What I don’t understand is that if the addiction gene is related to nicotine addiction, why aren’t more women smoking. Men smokers outnumber women smokers by about 4%. What I really want to know is how researchers keep getting grants for studies like this or the one where they studied if men love their football team more than their wives…

Are you addicted to the internet? What do you think constitutes an internet addiction?