Social Media & The Outrage Algorithm: What It's Doing to Your Brain + How To Take Back Control (Episode #41)

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Do you ever put your phone down after scrolling and feel genuinely worse than before you picked it up? You're not imagining it — and it's not an accident.

In this episode, Jess gets honest about what social media is actually doing to our brains and our mental health — from the dopamine loops designed to keep us addicted, to the outrage algorithm that feeds us the most inflammatory content available, to the comparison trap, body image pressure, FOMO, and sleep disruption that come along for the ride. 

Then she breaks down five practical steps to take back control without deleting everything and disappearing from the internet.

 In this episode, Jess discusses:

• Why social media is designed to be addictive — and the dopamine loop that keeps you coming back
• The outrage algorithm: why platforms serve you the most inflammatory content and what that does to your mood, patience, and perception of humanity
• The comparison trap, body image, and why passive scrolling is linked to lower self-esteem and life satisfaction
• The pressure to perform your life online — and why it's exhausting
• How social media disrupts sleep and fuels FOMO and loneliness
• 5 steps to take back control without deleting social media indefinitely 

You have more agency over your relationship with social media than you think. Your mental health depends on using it.

Connect with Jess:

• Instagram: @vitalbalancewithjess 
• Website: jessicatrone.com
• Email: vitalbalancewithjess@gmail.com

DISCLAIMER: The content shared in this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only, is not a substitute for the advice of medical doctors or practitioners and should not be used to prevent, diagnose, or treat any condition. Consult with a physician prior to beginning any fitness, health, or wellness regimen or routine.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Welcome to Vital Balance with Jess, the podcast for women who want real life strategy, no BS conversations about women's health. I'm your host, Jess. While building my career as an attorney, I struggled with hormone imbalances, anxiety, metabolic dysfunction, and a healthcare system that left me with more questions than answers. So I took matters into my own hands. And here's what I discovered. The real magic happens when you get curious, start asking questions, and listening to your body like it actually knows what it's doing. This podcast isn't about weight loss, physical appearance, or rigid wellness routines. It's about agency. I want you to know just how much control you have over your everyday well-being. And I want you to experience stable energy, predictable moods, a sharp yet calm mind, and a body you can trust. Because when women are well, our homes and communities thrive too. Let's get started. Welcome to Vital Balance. I'm Jess. I want to start today with a confession. There are days I put my phone down after scrolling social media and feel genuinely worse about the world than I did before I picked it up. Not worse about myself, though that happens too, but worse about people, about humanity in general. Right now, it's mostly the political content. And it's not so much about policy specifically, although that's part of it. It's more about the culture of outrage that has taken over so much of social media. The post driven entirely by emotion and zero nuance. The arguments that fall apart under the most basic scrutiny. They lack any logic, but yet the certainty the people who hold those positions seem to have, it's like they haven't even truly thought about their position, like truly assessed it. But somehow they're yelling at people, sometimes with very hateful rhetoric, at people who don't hold their views. And I find myself thinking, how did we get here? How are people this angry? How is critical thinking this rare? But sadly, the more I witness this, the angrier I become. The quicker I am to judge people who say certain things or hold certain positions. And then I'm judging people for being angry and it's making me angry. So clearly, this isn't good for anyone's mental health. And political outrage is far from the only detrimental issue when it comes to social media and its impact on mental health. It could be the comparison trap, the pressure to perform our lives for an audience if we're someone who relies on social media for our business or income, or just the low-grade anxiety that comes from never fully disconnecting. Social media is also an avenue people use to belittle others and take out their misery on strangers all while hiding behind a screen. People will say things they would never dream of saying in person to someone's face. So, as you may have guessed, today we're talking about social media and what it is actually doing to our brains and our mental health. And unfortunately, why it's designed to make us feel these emotions, these negative emotions that I'm describing, and what we can do to protect ourselves without necessarily deleting everything and moving off the grid. The first thing to understand about social media is that the way it makes us feel is not a side effect. It's the product. These platforms are engineered by teams of behavioral psychologists and engineers whose explicit goal is to maximize the amount of time we spend on these apps. And the primary mechanism they use to do that is dopamine, a neurotransmitter that I've discussed in numerous past episodes, including most recently the episodes on exercise. But every like, every comment, every notification triggers a small dopamine release, which over time trains our brain into learning that checking our phone might produce a reward. So it keeps sending us back to check. And the key word here is might. So this is called a variable reward schedule, the same psychological mechanism that makes slot machines so addictive. You don't get a reward every time, which actually makes the behavior more compulsive, not less. The anticipation of a surprise encourages continued effort. The result is a dopamine loop that keeps us engaged with these apps, not because we're necessarily enjoying it, but because our brain is chasing that next hit. And the more we use it, the more our baseline dopamine sensitivity drops, meaning that we need more stimulation to feel the same effect or the same high, which is exactly how addiction works. Now, I want to dive a little deeper into what I talked about at the beginning of this episode. Social media algorithms are specifically optimized to show us content that provokes an emotional response. We could call it the outrage algorithm. After all, the emotion that drives the most engagement seems to be outrage. Unfortunately, outrage keeps people on social media longer than joy does. It generates more responses, more shares. So the algorithm learns to feed us more of it. It doesn't matter which side of any issue you're on, the algorithm will find the most inflammatory version of whatever makes you react and serve it to you repeatedly. So when I find myself feeling worse about humanity after 20 minutes on social media, that's not a coincidence. It's been fed a curated diet of the most outrage-inducing content possible, specifically because my engagement with it tells the algorithm to keep feeding it to me. The platform is not showing me a representative sample of human thought. It's showing me the most extreme, emotionally charged version of it. And my brain, without that context, starts to believe that is what people are actually like. And that has real consequences for our mood, our patience, for our capacity to extend grace to actual human beings in real life. And hopefully, I'm not alone in that. I don't think I am. When we really take a step back and think about that, it's not good for our health, for humanity, for anything, really. The other major mental health cost of social media, and this one does get more airtime, is comparison. Humans are wired to compare ourselves to others. But social media weaponizes that instinct by giving us endless, curated feed of people presenting the best versions of their lives. Nobody seems to post their bad days. I would argue that it is becoming more common. Some people will do that, but very, very few people will post the argument they had with their spouse, or the fact that they haven't worked out in three weeks, or the way that their kitchen actually looks most of the time. What gets posted is the vacation, the milestone, the flattering photo, the achievement. And our brains, which are not well equipped to distinguish between curated highlight reels and reality, compare our whole unfiltered lives to everyone else's edited best moments. And then we start to look at our lives and ourselves more negatively, questioning why we're lacking, why we're not perfect. Even though the person whose life seems perfect definitely is not. Studies show that passive scrolling, consuming other people's content without actively engaging, is particularly strongly associated with decreased self-esteem, increased envy, and lower life satisfaction. The more you consume, the worse you tend to feel about your own life. For women especially, social media has a measurable and well-documented negative effect on body image, the concentration of appearance-focused content, whether it's fitness accounts, beauty influencers, before and after transformations, heavily filtered and edited images. It all creates an unrealistic and narrow visual standard that most women measure themselves against constantly. I've talked in previous episodes about body dysphoria and the ways early experiences in our lives shape how we see ourselves, and social media just amplifies those issues. Research on adolescent girls in particular shows clear correlations between heavy social media use and rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and self-harm. And while adults may be somewhat more resilient, we are far from immune. The comparison happens whether we're conscious of it or not. There's also a pressure for some people to consume and use social media as a professional tool. When your platform is part of your business, the line between authentic sharing and performance gets blurry pretty fast. You start to think about how things will look before you actually experience them. You might even tailor parts of your life in order to film or show things rather than for the purpose of actually living them. You might feel guilty for not posting. You measure your worth by engagement metrics. You compare your following to someone else's and then feel like you're failing. This is all a pressure to perform. Social media can also induce FOMO or the fear of missing out. What other people are doing, where they're going, who they're with, can create a persistent low-grade anxiety that your own life is somehow less than it should be. That anxiety has been linked to increased rates of loneliness, even among people who are objectively socially connected. And lastly, there's the issue of sleep. Most people use their phones right up until they go to bed and often while they're in bed. The blue light from our devices suppresses melatonin production. But even more importantly, the stimulating content activates the nervous system at a time when it should be winding down. And the emotional residue of whatever you scrolled through last, whether it brought you outrage, comparison, anxiety, it doesn't just disappear when you lay that phone down. It follows you into sleep. And poor sleep, as I've said in multiple episodes now, compounds every other mental and physical health challenge you might be dealing with. Okay, despite everything I just said, social media is not inherently evil. It does have genuine value. It connects people across distances, it builds communities around shared interests and experiences, it gives voices to people and perspectives that might otherwise go unheard, and it's a meaningful tool for business. But it is a tool that was built as a business without any regard for our mental health, our relationships, or our well-being. That doesn't mean that we should delete all social media. It just means we should use it deliberately rather than reactively. We have to be in charge of our relationship with it rather than letting the algorithm be in charge of us. And honestly, the stakes are real. Chronic social media use is associated with elevated anxiety and depression, disrupted sleep, diminished self-worth, increased cortisol, and as I described in my own experience, a more negative and reactive baseline emotional state. These are not trivial costs. They show up in our body, our relationships, and in our capacity to live the life we want to live. Okay, so how do we avoid the mental health consequences associated with social media? It's difficult, and it's something that I think we're all just gonna struggle with because social media is such a big part of our culture, our life. But I do have some strategies, some suggestions, and I've broken it down into five steps. Number one, audit how social media actually makes you feel. So before you change anything, get honest about what your current relationship with social media looks like. What is it actually doing to you for you? After you scroll through social media, do you feel better or worse? More connected or more isolated? Are you more motivated or more defeated? The answer to these questions might be different for different platforms or different types of content, but it's all useful information. This is, like I said, taking an audit or an inventory. Just start paying attention. Notice your mood before you pick up your phone and then after you put it down. Notice what kinds of content leave you feeling depleted versus joyful or energized. That awareness alone will start to shift your behavior. Number two, curate your feed very intentionally. Yes, there is an algorithm that is stacked against our mental health, but we have more control over what we see than we probably think. You can tell the apps that you want to see less of something. You can unfollow accounts that bring up negative feelings. I personally have made this a huge priority lately, and I've actually stopped following people I never thought I would have, including some friends and family members. They were posting things that triggered a reaction in me I didn't like, that just wasn't worth it. And just because I don't follow them on Instagram doesn't mean I don't love them or want them in my life. I think a lot of times we put stuff out on social media for the world to see that we would never actually talk to someone about face to face. If I disagree with someone about politics and that's all they ever post about, yet we don't talk about politics when we're together, I think choosing not to follow them on social media is okay. If you're true friends with that person, you don't need to stay up to date on their life through social media anyway. It should be through in-person contact, right? If you get on social media and you are seeing posts that elicit feelings of anger, frustration, anxiety, self-loathing, any of the negative emotions we know social media can cause, I encourage you to assess what accounts are causing those emotions. And if you have felt a negative emotion from that account more than once, you should consider not following it anymore. Just yesterday, I stopped following an account that I've been following for quite some time. It's a podcaster who often speaks about religion, although her podcast isn't just about religion. It's become more about that as of late. But anyway, she was making what sounded to me like very definitive statements about certain actions people should be taking if they're Christians. And these statements were not necessarily supported by scripture, and they were very rigid, very legalistic, and she made a distinction between true traditional Catholics and those who do not follow very traditional Catholicism. Um, she also made a distinction between Catholics and Protestants. Anyway, the way she presented it and the judgment behind it really irritated me. And I remembered that she had posted something the previous week that elicited very similar feelings in me. So I just immediately unfollowed her. I wasn't gaining enough positive information from her account to justify the negative emotions or even stress that her account had started to cause me. Look, you don't owe anyone your attention. Follow accounts that genuinely add something to your life, that educate, inspire you, make you laugh or smile or make you feel connected to something meaningful. Number three, set boundaries around usage. Intentional limits with social media are really important, and we hear this a lot, but it's for good reason. We need to try to limit the mindless scrolling. The two best places to start. No social media for the first 30 minutes after waking up in the morning, and in the 30 to 60 minutes prior to going to sleep at night. Give your brain time to orient to the day when you wake up before being flooded with information and stimulation. And at night, the restriction is about protecting our sleep, both from a blue light perspective, right? We want to limit screen exposure in general before bed, but perhaps more importantly, we want to calm our minds and not consume information that will at best activate our brains and at worst cause negative emotions like stress and anxiety. Consider designating specific times throughout the day for checking social media rather than picking up your phone reactively throughout the day. Make it a challenge for yourself to exercise self-control in that regard. I know there are apps that you can download that will prevent you from opening up social media apps based on the guidelines you set. So if this is something you really struggle with and you don't think that you have much self-control, maybe consider downloading one of those apps or somehow installing a restriction on those social media apps so that you can only look at them at certain times or for certain periods of time. Number four, take intentional breaks. Periodic social media detoxes, even short ones, can meaningfully reset your relationship with these platforms. Research on social media breaks consistently shows improvements in mood, life satisfaction, and sense of presence in daily life, even after a week of not engaging with those apps. You don't have to do it forever, but just giving your nervous system a genuine break from the constant input allows us to return with more intentionality and less compulsion. I've done this periodically, and what strikes me every time is how quickly the FOMO and the lack of living in the present and picking up my phone the moment I feel slightly bored or have a few minutes to fill. Those feelings all fade faster than you might think. And by day three, I don't know, two or three, you will likely realize, oh, I don't really miss it nearly as much as I thought I would, right? It just kind of became a habit, probably because our brain is searching for those little quick dopamine hits. But what you will find is that you will be much more present with the people in your life when you are free from that addiction, essentially. And lastly, number five, reframe your relationship with social media. Ultimately, like I said, the goal isn't necessarily to eliminate social media. For most of us, that's neither realistic or even necessary. The goal is to use it on your terms rather than its terms. To engage actively and intentionally rather than scrolling passively and reactively. To share something on social media because you genuinely want to, not because the algorithm rewards it or because you feel obligated to document your life. When I think about my own content creation, this podcast or my social media presence for work, I don't, I rarely post personal stuff on Instagram. I don't put my kids' faces or anything. I rarely post about my kids. It's pretty much just for business. But what I find is that when I am posting about things that I am truly thinking about that arise in my business, the things that genuinely matter to me, those are typically the things that are genuinely gonna help someone, right? Rather than this like forced feeling of needing to post something all the time. And that's also why I'll go through like a week of posting almost every day and then I won't post for two weeks. And that's just generally because I just base it off of like my urges and how I'm feeling and because. When it feels like performance, it's exhausting. But when it feels like connection, it's energizing. And that distinction is worth protecting. Social media is one of the defining features of the world we live in. And pretending it doesn't affect us isn't productive. The outrage, the comparison, the dopamine loops, it's all real. The sleep disruption is real. And the cumulative effect on our mental health, our self-perception, and our ability to be present in our actual lives is real. The good news is that you get to decide what role it plays in your life. Not the algorithm, not the culture that says you have to be online all the time to stay relevant. Again, like most of what I discuss on this podcast, you have agency to make choices that will either positively or negatively impact your health. I encourage you to exercise that agency and use it like it's your superpower. Because far too many of us just passively let life pass us by. We let life happen to us instead of actively living the life we were designed to live. Don't let that be the case with social media and technology. Your mental health will improve drastically if you make conscious choices around it and get clear on your relationship with it. Thank you so much for being here. Until next time. Thanks so much for tuning in to Vital Balance with Jess. If you loved this episode, it would mean the world if you would leave a review, share it with a friend, or hit subscribe so you never miss a dose of real talk on women's health. Remember, you have more control over your health than you've been told, and sustainable change is possible. Keep listening to your body and showing up for yourself. I'll see you next time.