How Social Media Affects Our Minds & Emotional Wellness with Dr. Azadeh Aalai • Ep 69
Social media is woven into nearly every aspect of modern life, but do we really know how it's affecting our mental and emotional wellness? Psychologist Dr. Azadeh Aalai shares how mental health is impacted by social media and how we can reclaim a healthier relationship with our technology.
The Hidden Design Behind Your Favorite Apps
One of the biggest concerns is what's happening behind the scenes in terms of how the creators of big tech have designed their platforms to lure users into staying on them longer than intended. And it's absolutely tied to money.
Dr. Aalai shared an interesting observation from her students: even the ones who don't think technology should be classified as addictive will, in the same breath, admit they spend far more time on these platforms than they meant to. Those "micro moments" of opening an app can turn into an hour before anyone realizes it. Something embedded in the design makes it genuinely difficult for users to moderate their time or stay aware of how long they've been scrolling.
Is Social Media Actually Addictive?
If you look at the criteria typically associated with addiction, a lot of it lines up: lack of control over our behaviors, negative outcomes, an inability to stop even when it's hurting our sleep, time management, or relationships. There's even a kind of craving response, similar to what happens with substances, though obviously not the same chemical process. When we anticipate a photo or a trip specifically because we want to post about it, we're being driven in our offline lives by what we plan to curate online. That's where things get sticky.
This also raises a bigger question: are people planning trips or experiences because they want to live them, or because they want to post about them? That's a psychological shift in how we process the world that doesn't get talked about enough.
Notifications, Colors & the Dopamine Hit
The design elements behind notifications, likes, and engagement features are all leveraging basic psychology. Even the colors that activate on our phones when we get a new notification, the vibration, the sounds, all of it triggers the reward and pleasure pathways in our brains.
The "dopamine hit" concept has become popular for a reason. While it's not as intense as what happens with substances, there is real pleasure and stimulation triggered when our devices alert us to something new, and that becomes very hard to resist.
Colors specifically can create a sense of urgency, even when there's nothing urgent happening. There's deliberate strategic branding in the colors, letters, and design choices we see across these apps. We're not consciously aware of it, but on an unconscious level, it's shaping how we engage with our phones.
The takeaway here is important: people often think their inability to put the phone down is simply a lack of self-discipline. In reality, the designs themselves are engineered to make that kind of self-control extremely difficult.
Algorithms and Radicalization
The same design principles extend to the algorithms curating our feeds. As our feeds become more and more tailored to what we already engage with, it becomes harder to resist what's being shown to us. This creates bubbles where we're siloed from the full range of information, opinions, and even facts available.
Dr. Aalai's book includes an entire section on the role digital spaces play in extremism and radicalization, much of which is built into these same profit-driven algorithms. The leaders in big tech aren't primarily concerned with our mental health or the state of our democracy. They care about engagement, data, and monetizing every moment of our attention. Recognizing this as a systemic issue, rather than a personal failing, can help take some of the pressure off individuals who feel like they "can't resist."
Living Without Social Media
Dr. Aalai isn't on any social media herself. She originally intended to take a temporary break, a digital detox, but over time realized she didn't need it back in her life and eventually deleted her accounts entirely.
She acknowledges this isn't realistic or recommended for everyone. It comes with real costs, including missing out on group chats, professional visibility, and even being left out of event planning among friends. But she also notes that stepping away filters out shallower relationships, since the people who genuinely want to stay in touch will make the extra effort to text or call directly.
She's clear that this is a personal boundary each user has to figure out for themselves based on their own life, profession, and relationships. She specifically points out there's a level of privilege in being able to opt out entirely, since not everyone has access to the same alternative pipelines for support, visibility, or business promotion.
FOMO: The Force That Pulls Us Back
Fear of missing out is real, and it shows up in multiple forms: missing social invitations, missing developments in current events, or missing professional opportunities. Many students have told Dr. Aalai they don't know how they're supposed to develop professionally or share their work without being on social media.
This becomes a genuine cost-benefit analysis. Even with her most recent book aimed at a broader audience, she's had to weigh the visibility she might gain from being on social platforms against the pressure she wants to put on big tech to build better guardrails for users. For her, staying off the platforms is itself a form of political and personal expression, even though it comes at a real cost.
Comparison, Curated Lives, & Self-Esteem
Seeing everyone's highlight reels, their achievements, their "perfect" moments, takes a toll. This triggers what's known as social comparison, where we use other people's curated lives to measure our own. Because people are more likely to post idealized versions of their lives, we tend to experience upward social comparison, meaning we're comparing ourselves to people who appear to be doing better than we are on some metric.
This is directly associated with dips in self-esteem. Success on social media is often narrowly defined around material things, while the intangible parts of life that actually make it worth living, like a quiet moment with a pet or a good conversation with a parent, rarely get the same attention or engagement. Over time, this can quietly reshape what we value and what we aspire to.
The Problem With Fake Perfection
Even when we intellectually understand that images and posts are curated or edited, our brains are still wired to believe what we see. This isn't new. It echoes the airbrushing controversies around magazines in the pre-internet era, where campaigns pushed back on unrealistic images of women's bodies. Social media, especially now combined with AI-generated content, has magnified that same dynamic.
Knowing intellectually that most images are staged or edited doesn't stop the emotional or psychological impact of scrolling through a feed full of them. This is why it matters to talk with young people about curation, about how selective people are in what they share, and to intentionally spend time offline and living in the present.
Messing With Your Sleep
Sleep is one of the clearest casualties. Research and anecdotal reports both show that young users are spending more time on devices at night, going to bed later, and experiencing disrupted sleep because their phones are close by. Light exposure from screens blocks the brain's natural secretion of melatonin, the hormone responsible for winding down and falling asleep. Our brains, from an evolutionary standpoint, simply haven't adapted to this kind of constant stimulation.
The Impact on Developing Brains
Developing brains are especially vulnerable, since they wire themselves based on what they're repeatedly exposed to. Digital devices are so stimulating that they can make other, less stimulating activities, like reading a book or playing a card game, feel far less engaging by comparison. Pediatric and child development experts recommend delaying screen exposure in infancy and early childhood specifically because young brains are so malleable and vulnerable to their environment.
On average, kids are now getting their own personal smartphone around age eight. The pandemic accelerated this shift significantly, as many parents understandably loosened restrictions during a stressful and uncertain time, which is when a lot of tweens and preteens ended up on platforms like TikTok. Once those habits form, they're difficult to unlearn, for kids and adults alike.
It's also worth noting that many prominent figures in the tech industry restrict their own children's use of the platforms and devices they've built, because they're fully aware of how damaging the algorithms can be.
It's Not All Doom and Gloom
Dr. Aalai's book, Disconnection: The Search for Identity in the Digital Age, doesn't stop at the problems. It also explores what we can do to reconnect with ourselves and reduce the pull of our devices, including practical approaches to digital detoxes.
She's also observed a growing "tech lash" among young people, many of whom are nostalgic for an era they weren't even part of. Flip phones are making a comeback among people who grew up with smartphones. More users are becoming attuned to how their device use actually makes them feel, and are actively looking for ways to reconnect with themselves, with others, and with their communities.
The goal isn't to shame anyone for using social media. It's to help people make decisions about their tech use from a place of information and intention, rather than a default habit.
Dr. Azadeh Aalai is an Associate Professor with Tenure at Queensborough Community College, CUNY. She also serves as an adjunct for the M.A. program in Psychology at NYU. Her most recent book explores the perils of socialization in our technology-saturated era, and is entitled "Disconnection: The Search for Identity in a Digital Age." She hopes to be part of the conversation as growing techlash is building, to help users reclaim their lives offline. She is a regular contributor to Psychology Today, in addition to other mainstream publications. She resides in Brooklyn, NY.
Learn more about Dr. Aalai at Psychology Today's website
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