Upon That Which the Algorithms Feast 🍽️
There's a particular kind of apathy that the modern media diet produces, it is not accidental.
The feeling of having seen too much, cared briefly, and then moved on because what else are you going to do about it right now? The world is on fire. The feed refreshes. You scroll to the next thing, having a laugh at a meme in between the horrors. After a while, the outrage stops catching and something quieter settles in instead — a low-grade sense that everything is worse than you remember before and no one seems to be able to stop it.
That feeling is useful to someone. A population that feels powerless doesn't organise, doesn't push back, doesn't ask difficult questions. It just keeps watching on, slowly being normalised in the narratives. The machine that produces that feeling is the same machine that profits from your attention.
Most people don't connect that apathy to what they've been consuming. Why would they? Nothing dramatic happened. You were just on your phone for a bit.
But there are two algorithms running your life that most people have never audited. The first is the one on your phone — trained by every post you linger on, every piece of outrage you react to, every late-night scroll sesh you can't put down. The second is older and runs deeper — trained by every thought pattern you return to, every emotional loop you don't question, every belief you absorbed before you were old enough to consciously choose.
This post is about both types and what you can actually influence about either.
Why We're Drawn to It 🧲
Psychologist Coltan Scrivner has spent years researching what he calls morbid curiosity, which he defines simply as a motivation to seek out information about dangerous phenomena (Scrivner, 2021). His research finds it's a normally occurring psychological trait — not a sign of something wounded in your mind, but something that in all likelihood helped keep your ancestors alive. If you understand how predators hunt, how diseases spread, how violence unfolds, you're better equipped to survive contact with any of them. The brain running threat simulations from the safety of your couch is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
This is why true crime is genuinely compelling. Why horror films are a multi-billion dollar industry. Why you'll watch fifteen minutes of dashcam footage you didn't plan to watch. It's not weakness. It's your nervous system doing its job.
There's a second layer to this, identified by psychologist Dolf Zillmann: what he called excitation transfer (Zillmann, 2003). The physiological arousal generated by disturbing content — elevated heart rate, heightened attention, the low-grade tension of watching something threatening — doesn't simply switch off when you close the tab. That residual arousal carries forward and intensifies whatever emotional state comes next. Watch something violent before bed and you're not just taking a memory into sleep — you're taking a body still running on stress chemistry into a REM cycle that will spend the next few hours processing it (van der Helm & Walker, 2009).
The content isn't neutral, and the timing isn't either.
This is where context matters more than content. A horror film with a satisfying ending gives the nervous system resolution — threat detected, threat resolved, arousal dissipates. A true crime podcast that ends ambiguously, or loops directly into another case, or a news feed that never resolves at all — that arousal stays live. Your body doesn't know the difference between "this happened to someone else, somewhere, years ago" and "this is happening now." It responds to the signal, not the timestamp.
My mum's a nurse. She comes home and watches Dr G: Medical Examiner — a reality show about an LA mortician who works out cause of death. I used to tell her not to watch it before bed. But thinking about it now, maybe that one's actually fine — every episode ends with an answer. The case resolves. The nervous system gets a landing. Rolling news never gives you that. It's designed not to.
When It Starts Costing You 💸
Research into sad music gives us a useful window here. Across multiple studies, Sandra Garrido and Emery Schubert found that both ruminators and non-ruminators showed significant increases in depression after listening to self-selected sad music — and that people with higher levels of rumination were more likely to reach for sad music in the first place, believing it would help, while the mood data said otherwise (Garrido & Schubert, 2015b; ter Bogt et al., 2021). The content wasn't the whole story. The relationship to the content was.
The same logic applies to disturbing media. When you're already anxious or depleted, the nervous system has less capacity to process what it's taking in and move on. Instead, it ruminates. It replays. The research on media exposure and vicarious trauma suggests this has real costs — Holman et al. (2014) found that people who consumed six or more hours of Boston Marathon bombing coverage in the week after the event reported higher acute stress than people who had actually been physically present at the bombings. Six hours of watching was more stressful, measurably, than being there.
The mechanism, researchers suggest, is that repeated media exposure keeps the stress response active in a way direct experience doesn't — rumination keeps the threat alive in the mind long after the event has passed (Holman et al., 2014). Comstock and Platania (2017) found similar patterns: laypeople who viewed traumatic events through social media and television showed meaningful secondary stress responses, even without any prior trauma history or direct connection to the events.
Then there's what happens at night.
REM sleep is when the brain processes the emotional content of the day — reactivating recent experiences, consolidating memory, and, under healthy conditions, gradually stripping the emotional charge from difficult material (van der Helm & Walker, 2009). It's one of the ways we metabolise hard things. But that process works on whatever you've fed it. Watch distressing content in the hours before sleep and you're not just carrying a memory into bed — you're handing your brain a full inbox of unresolved material to work through during the one window it has to recover. The late-night scroll isn't just a bad habit. It's bad timing, neurologically.
None of this means dark content is off the table. It means the dose matters, the timing matters, and your baseline state matters more than either.
How the Machine Exploits It 🤖
The nervous system vulnerabilities in the previous section aren't a design oversight that tech companies are trying to fix. They're closer to being seen as a feature. The entire architecture of a social media feed is built around one goal: keep you there longer. The most reliable way to do that, it turns out, is to make the next reward unpredictable.
Psychologists call this variable ratio reinforcement — the same scheduling principle that makes poker machines so hard to walk away from. When rewards arrive on an unpredictable schedule, the dopamine system doesn't just respond to the reward itself; it fires in anticipation of it, during the uncertainty (Clark & Zack, 2023). Infinite scroll removes the natural stopping point. Pull-to-refresh mimics the lever. The feed is a poker machine with better graphics and your friends are sometimes in it.
Colour is doing work here too. The saturated icons, the vivid notification badges — app interfaces are designed to maximise visual salience before you've even opened anything. Switching your phone to greyscale is a small act of friction that actually holds up in research: Wickord and Quaiser-Pohl (2023) found switching your phone screen to black and white mode measurably reduced smartphone usage time in participants with problematic use. Your brain becomes less drawn to something that doesn't look like ripe fruit.
Then there's the DM trap — specific to apps like Instagram. You open it to read a message from a friend. The app responds by routing you into an infinite scroll of Reels. You didn't choose that. It chose for you. This is why I use an app called Beeper to consolidate my messaging — I can read and reply without being funnelled back into the feed. Delete the native apps entirely and use the browser version instead, and you'll find it's deliberately clunky enough that you won't stay long. That friction is the point.
The news feed version of this is more insidious, because it wears the costume of information.
Eli Pariser identified the filter bubble problem in 2011 — the idea that algorithmic personalisation creates an information universe curated around your existing preferences, narrowing what you see without you noticing (Pariser, 2011). What's more troubling is what Bail et al. found in 2018: when Republicans were exposed to liberal content via a Twitter bot for a month, they didn't become more moderate. They became substantially more conservative (Bail et al., 2018). Exposure to opposing views, delivered in the morally charged, outrage-optimised register of a social feed, doesn't build bridges. It digs the trench deeper.
This is the 6pm news problem, updated. George Gerbner spent decades documenting what heavy television viewing does to perception — heavy viewers consistently overestimate how dangerous the world is, a pattern he called mean world syndrome (Gerbner & Gross, 1976). The mechanism was advertising: fear keeps you watching past the ad break. The algorithmic feed runs the same play, except now it's personalised to your specific triggers, delivered without a schedule, and it never ends.
The film Nightcrawler (2014) paints a sharp depiction of how these incentives bubble together in the context of network TV to encourage horrifically dark, psychopathic behaviour from the people who work there. We understand this more easily at a TV network — but the same principles and dark incentives are exactly what's shaping social media and AI companies. Watch it if you haven't.
And here's the sleep connection: whatever this feed serves you in the hour before bed is what your REM cycle inherits. The late-night scroll through algorithmically-curated outrage is the worst possible pre-sleep diet, not just psychologically but neurologically (van der Helm & Walker, 2009).
What You Can Actually Do 🧑🚒
None of this requires a dramatic digital detox or throwing your phone into the ocean. It requires friction — small, deliberate interventions that put a pause between the impulse and the scroll.
Start with the screen itself. Both iOS and Android let you switch to greyscale mode — your phone becomes significantly less visually compelling, and the research backs this up as more than a placebo (Wickord & Quaiser-Pohl, 2023). On iOS, the Shortcuts app lets you get more granular: you can automate greyscale to activate only when you open specific apps. Instagram opens, colour drains out. YouTube stays in colour because you actually need it. It takes ten minutes to set up and runs silently in the background. I'll be walking through the exact steps in an upcoming Digital Alchemy post — but even the blunt instrument of system-wide greyscale is worth trying first.
Notifications are the other lever. Turn off badges. Enable notification summaries rather than instant alerts. On Android, you can filter notification types within apps — allow Uber trip updates, block marketing pings. If you wear a smartwatch, this matters even more: a wrist tap for every non-urgent alert is a nervous system interrupt that adds up across a day in ways most people don't account for.
For messaging specifically — the apps are designed to route you from a DM straight into an infinite feed. Opening Instagram to read a message and finding yourself in Reels twenty minutes later isn't a willpower failure. It's the intended outcome. I use an app called Beeper to consolidate all my messaging into one inbox, which means I can reply to people on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger without opening those apps at all. A word of warning: Beeper routes your messages through a third-party platform, which has privacy implications. I use it only for personal accounts and I'd encourage you to read up on how it works before committing. But for disrupting the DM trap, it's been genuinely useful. The lower-tech version is just deleting the native apps and using the mobile browser versions instead — they're clunky by design, and that's exactly why they work.
On news: the 6pm bulletin and the algorithmically-curated feed are running the same play through different delivery mechanisms. Both are optimised to hold attention through fear and outrage, not to inform. If you want to stay across what's happening in the world without handing your nervous system over to an engagement algorithm, try The Conversation (theconversation.com) — peer-reviewed academics writing for a general audience, no advertising model, no outrage loop. A weekly long-form digest instead of a daily passive feed is another option. The goal isn't ignorance. It's intentional exposure rather than ambient fear.
The Replacement Habit ⚾️
The detox only works if there's something in its place.
Idle hands reach for the phone. That's not a character flaw — it's a habit loop, and habit loops need a replacement behaviour, not just a removed one. So before you need it, decide what you're reaching for instead.
My recommendation: a physical book. Not a self-help book — you're already doing the work. Pick something that's genuinely an escape. Science fiction, fantasy, literary fiction — whatever pulls you in. Something you read because you want to know what happens next, not because you're optimising yourself. The physical object matters too. It needs to be somewhere visible, not buried under a pile of things. If it's not in reach, the phone will be.
For the shorter moments — the three-second itch when you're waiting for something, the idle hands between tasks — a mantra or a short meditation isn't just a distraction. It's a rewiring. Every time you interrupt the impulse to reach for the phone and replace it with something slower, you're feeding a different neural pathway. The instant gratification of an infinite scroll is a sugar hit — fast, cheap, and leaves you needing another one. A three-to-seven minute meditation, mantra-assisted or not, offers the nervous system something it's quietly been craving: stillness. Slowness. A reward that doesn't arrive immediately.
Do it enough times and the default starts to shift. You stop reaching for the phone in spare moments not because you've disciplined yourself out of it, but because you've genuinely started to prefer what replaced it. The nervous system learns. It just needs you to show it something worth learning.
The 49-Day Experiment 📅
Everything in this post is easier with a container.
Reading about the nervous system effects of disturbing content is one thing. Actually changing what you feed your mind — and sustaining it long enough to feel the difference — is another. That gap between knowing and doing is exactly what structured support is for.
Soul Mapping is a 49-day self-directed course built around the idea that real change needs more than information. What you consume is part of what we look at directly. Not as a ban. As an experiment. You try it for 49 days, you see how your nervous system feels at the end, and then you decide what to let back in. Most people have never taken a real break from ambient fear as background noise. Most don't know what their baseline actually feels like without it.
You can't assess the impact of something you've never taken a break from.
References
Bail, C. A., Argyle, L. P., Brown, T. W., Bumpus, J. P., Chen, H., Hunzaker, M. B. F., Lee, J., Mann, M., Merhout, F., & Volfovsky, A. (2018). Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(37), 9216–9221. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1804840115
Clark, L., & Zack, M. (2023). Engineered highs: Reward variability and frequency as potential prerequisites of behavioural addiction. Addictive Behaviors, 140, 107626. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2023.107626
Comstock, C., & Platania, J. (2017). The role of media-induced secondary traumatic stress on perceptions of distress. American International Journal of Social Science, 6(1). https://docs.rwu.edu/fcas_fp
Garrido, S., & Schubert, E. (2015b). Moody melodies: Do they cheer us up? A study of the effect of sad music on mood. Psychology of Music, 43(2), 244–261. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735613501938
Gerbner, G., & Gross, L. (1976). Living with television: The violence profile. Journal of Communication, 26(2), 173–199. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1976.tb01397.x
Holman, E. A., Garfin, D. R., & Silver, R. C. (2014). Media's role in broadcasting acute stress following the Boston Marathon bombings. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(1), 93–98. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1316265110
Pariser, E. (2011). The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. Penguin Press.
Scrivner, C. (2021). The psychology of morbid curiosity: Development and initial validation of the morbid curiosity scale. Personality and Individual Differences, 183, 111139. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2021.111139
ter Bogt, T., Canale, N., Lenzi, M., Vieno, A., & van den Eijnden, R. (2021). Sad music depresses sad adolescents: A listener's profile. Psychology of Music, 49(2), 257–272. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735619849622
van der Helm, E., & Walker, M. P. (2009). Overnight therapy? The role of sleep in emotional brain processing. Psychological Bulletin, 135(5), 731–748. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016570
Wickord, L.-C., & Quaiser-Pohl, C. (2023). Suffering from problematic smartphone use? Why not use grayscale setting as an intervention! — An experimental study. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 10, 100294. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2023.100294
Zillmann, D. (2003). Theory of affective dynamics: Emotions and moods. In J. Bryant, D. Roskos-Ewoldsen, & J. Cantor (Eds.), Communication and emotion: Essays in honor of Dolf Zillmann (pp. 533–568). Lawrence Erlbaum.
Further Reading
The following sources informed the research and thinking behind this post but are not directly cited in the text.
Garrido, S., Eerola, T., & McFerran, K. (2017). Group rumination: Social interactions around music in people with depression. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 490.
Holte, A. J., & Ferraro, F. R. (2020). True colors: Grayscale setting reduces screen time in college students. The Social Science Journal. https://doi.org/10.1080/03623319.2020.1737461
Holte, A. J., Giesen, D. T., & Ferraro, F. R. (2021). Color me calm: Grayscale phone setting reduces anxiety and problematic smartphone use. Current Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02020-y
Ramsden, P. (2017). Vicarious trauma, PTSD and social media: Does watching graphic videos cause trauma? Journal of Depression and Anxiety, 6(3 Suppl). DOI: 10.4172/2167-1044-C1-002 [Conference abstract]
Scrivner, C. (2025). Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away. Penguin Random House.
