How social media re-wired us all

Here’s how social media and mobile internet use re-wired our social and emotional instincts to make us more primal, pre-social, irrational, inward, and inauthentic.

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Jake Ernst

What is Just Trying To Help?

I’m Jake Ernst and I’m a therapist. Life's already hard enough. Managing the stress of modern life shouldn't be.

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Last week, I talked about what happens when the internet acts as a replacement for a caregiver. I was talking about how being online near-constantly rewires the stress-threat response and how that has the potential to reshape our choices and preferences for who we rely on (or what we rely on) to help us feel good.

When apps and algorithms take hold of our stress management and emotion regulation system, we may be less likely to rely on others for connection, safety, and security. We also may be less likely to trust that others will be available or will be able to reliably support us or soothe us in the same way our devices can.

Yeah, I know this is a bold claim. But I am convinced social media overuse has changed how all of us relate.

Let’s zoom out. Mobile internet, 5G data, and wi-fi enabled the development of smartphone apps and features that fundamentally changed how we connect. The addition of the front-facing camera, the “Like” button, the News Feed, location-based data sharing, and the ever-changing algorithms allowed us to simulate the felt experience of social interaction without the deeper forms of emotional connection. That is, the basic design and social validation features of these apps make it feel like we are more connected than we actually are.

Now let’s zoom in. The architecture of social media and entertainment apps are eerily similar to the design and function of the human brain and body. For example, our feeds and algorithms have similar features to that of the brain, bloodstream, immune system, and nervous system, which are all constantly sending and interpreting signals throughout the body to influence the organism’s performance and functioning. With each new input, the machine becomes wiser and better equipped to anticipate, interpret, and initiate a required response. In essence, these apps are designed to function as replacements for parts of our brains and bodies. They are also designed to replace the key figures in our lives— our companions and caregivers.

It is my belief that using mobile internet and social media at any age:

1) exploits our primitive instincts to make us more primal and less socially engaged;

2) trains us to be more self-focused than other-focused;

3) alters our system of beliefs by changing our sense perception of what is imagined, true, real, and hyperreal; and

4) changes the authentic expression of our core emotions, which creates patterns of repeated stress activation, alarm, worry, anger, immediacy, overwhelm, escape, and hypervigilance. Yikes, if accurate.

In the following sections, I’m going to outline some of the negative impacts of overuse and explain how I think these apps, their features, and the companies that profit from our overuse change how we all relate to one another.

Highly activating content increases our stress chemistry and wires us for protection rather than connection. Exposure to stressful content keeps us hypervigilant and hyperaroused, making us more defensive or predatorial. These apps also exploit our primitive, pre-social instincts to pursue, attack, and dominate; we are constantly offering aggressive hot-takes, takedowns, and dogpiles. We also get piled on if we say something people disagree with. We are the hunters and the hunted.

The structure of the apps allow us to depersonalize the user on the other end, turning our social engagement system off. Algorithms reward constant engagement, emulating a survival of the fittest model where the heaviest users are pushed highly engaging and trending content. They are rewarded with social currency in the form of likes, followers, and in-group membership. Social media could be unintentionally reinforcing or creating these hierarchies— survival of the fittest becomes survival of the most followed.

We possess a primal urge to belong and avoid missing out on social connections. The continuous influx of updates via the 24-hour news feed reinforces this need for constant broadcasting. For some, there's no respite from this cycle of sharing. The incessant feeds and endless scrolling keep us emotionally stimulated but socially disconnected, leaving our relationships in a pre-social state. While these apps offer personal rewards and validation through engagement metrics, they fail to provide meaningful social relationships and social feedback.

Social media cultivates an obsessive focus on the self, accentuating an often-false belief that we’re constantly being observed or perceived. We are prone to taking things more personally when we’re constantly shining the spotlight on ourselves. The platform potentially normalizes narcissism through increased instances of Acquired Situational Narcissism, fostering the need for chronic self-focus. Moreover, social media place an emphasis on excessive uniqueness and individuality, creating the expectation for everyone to strive for distinctiveness, sometimes at the expense genuine connection.

Being constantly online may also perpetuate a skewed perception of reality, as those who do are inundated with highlight reels of other people’s lives and, by contrast, facing their own personal shortcomings or perceived failures. Additionally, the prevalence of oversharing and forced vulnerability may raise questions about its benefits. Main Character Syndrome emerges as people start to believe they are the center of the world, reshaping their interactions with others and potentially amplifying confirmation bias. This shift towards chronic self-focus contributes to rising levels of loneliness, disconnection, and a decline in genuine friendships, diverting attention away from empathy, true connection, and genuine community engagement.

Becoming self-focused (or losing our ability to remain other-focused) might also be the result of digital overload. There is too much social feedback and not enough time or capacity to integrate it. In some cases, social media may also be reinforcing avoidance, escapism, and numbing, leaving us less likely to reach out, connect, do prosocial acts, or even face our problems in the real-world. It is becoming easier to live a stress-free existence online than it is to live a life in person. Social media could also be reducing our capacity for creativity, imagination, curiosity, spontaneity, and play; artificial intelligence, algorithms, and content generators reinforce the need for a creator economy rather than an economy of creation.

Social media is teaching us to awfulize, catastrophize, and rehearse distress more than we need to; algorithms, like buttons, comments sections, and viral content make the problems seem more important because they get more attention and engagement. Social media might also be training us to spot problems rather than find solutions; we stay stuck in cycles of grievance rather than solving the problems that impact us directly.

Constant multitasking and rapid information processing required while using screens can overwhelm the brain’s ability to retain information temporarily, leading to difficulties in remembering recent events, tasks, or instructions. Extended screen use can also affect attention and concentration, which are crucial components of memory formation. Constant exposure to stimuli from screens, such as notifications, videos, and scrolling content, can lead to attentional fatigue and reduced ability to focus, making it harder to encode and retain new information

There is an endless feed with no bottom, which keeps us operating from the primitive, reactive, lower parts of our brain rather than from the prefrontal cortex. We lose the ability to discern, pay attention, and think clearly. Algorithms create filter bubbles and distort our reality by creating silos of disconnection from other viewpoints. Algorithms and specific styles of content creation might also be creating thought contagion, where we learn what to think instead of how to think. We might also be losing our ability to discern what content, news, and information is real and what is fabricated by algorithms or artificial intelligence; we might be having a hard time distinguishing fact from fiction and reality from imagination.

The stress from social media and internet overuse can cause us to misinterpret or misunderstand the messaging of our own emotions while using these apps (and perhaps even when not using them). Notifications and constant flickering or screen changes ignites our startle response and lowers our threshold for coping, which increases the stress load.

Social media might be making it hard for us to discern the difference between everyday emotions, general stress, distress, overwhelm, and trauma. Social media might be making us more prone to judgment and criticism, especially towards those who are too similar or too different from us.

Social media could also be contributing to the undercurrent of rage, rumination, resentment, and exasperation we feel because social media and the digital town square has become the only social arena through which we process our fear and anger. Social media might also be reducing our ability to notice good things happening around us if we’ve been trained to spot danger, notice problems, and work our stress out on others via the internet.

Final thoughts

I wanted to end this week’s note by talking about why this matters. If my theories are true, this means that social media is a major contributor to our pattern of collective stress by fueling the crisis of connection.

Social media and the internet level the playing field and lower the points of access for participation in the global conversation, particularly the emerging discussions about what it feels like to be human today. This is unprecedented. We are witnessing the democratization of collective wellbeing and human suffering. Being an active and engaged user of the internet is one of the main ways we exercise our freedoms as a digital citizen. Recent data has shown that Gen Z is the most globally similar generation, lending credence to my point that being online today exposes us to new ideas, new cultures and subcultures, and entirely new worldviews which can be really good for us or it can have disastrous effects.

While the internet offers us many benefits, my concern here is that our brains and nervous systems (the branches of nerves that help us manage stress) are not sophisticated enough to process the stressors, sensory input, information, and novel ideas from the environments we’re digitally exposed to. Since humans haven’t yet evolved to meet the current environmental demands created by the internet and social media, we have been trapped in a stress loop— an endless cycle of stress-threat activation where we have no realistic or practical way of hopping off of it.

I think I’m still figuring out what this means for us as a species, but I think it explains the collective stress we all seem to be experiencing to varying degrees.

I’ll continue to write more on this topic if that is of interest.

Until then, keep riding the wave. I’m riding those same waves too.

Jake