WHY DO WE TURN TO DIGITAL PLATFORMS WHEN WE ARE ALREADY STRESSED?

Jan. 15, 2026

THE MENTAL FORECAST

Why do people often spend more time on their phones, social media, or digital platforms precisely when they feel anxious, overwhelmed, or under pressure? This question challenges the widespread assumption that digital media are the primary cause of stress. Empirical research instead suggests that stress-related psychological states — such as anxiety, fear of missing out, and emotional dysregulation — often precede intensified digital engagement (Elhai et al., 2020). Rather than generating stress from nothing, digital environments are frequently entered under stress, functioning as spaces where individuals seek immediacy, reassurance, or temporary relief.

Neuroscience helps explain why this pattern is so common. Stress impairs the brain’s executive control systems while amplifying reward-sensitive and habitual processes, making fast, low-effort forms of stimulation especially appealing (Arnsten, 2009). In these conditions, digital engagement becomes less a matter of leisure or preference and more a short-term regulatory strategy — an attempt to manage affect, uncertainty, or social belonging when cognitive resources are already strained.

Yet the digital environments accessed under stress are not neutral. Platform designs prioritize attention capture through notifications, algorithmic recommendations, and visible social metrics, which increase cognitive load and emotional arousal. Over time, this can lead to technostress — a form of strain arising from the interaction between individual vulnerability and socio-technical demands (Tarafdar et al., 2019). What begins as an adaptive coping response can thus reinforce the very stress it seeks to alleviate.

At a broader level, stress is not randomly distributed across society. Social epidemiological research shows that chronic stress is closely linked to economic insecurity, inequality, and performance-based evaluation, rather than to individual weakness or poor self-control (Marmot, 2020). Digital engagement patterns therefore reflect wider structural pressures, where depleted psychosocial resources increase reliance on digitally mediated forms of regulation and recognition.

What becomes visible, then, is a self-reinforcing loop embedded in a broader economic system. Contemporary economic structures generate chronic stress through insecurity, competition, performance pressure, and the internalization of productivity norms. This stress is then actively exploited by digital platforms and social media, which capture attention, monetize anxiety, and translate uncertainty into engagement. At the same time, these platforms contribute directly to the reproduction of stress by intensifying comparison, accelerating time, enforcing permanent visibility, and extending economic pressure into everyday life. Stress is therefore both produced upstream by the economic system and recirculated downstream through digital infrastructures, which feed back into the same economic logic. The result is a closed loop in which stress becomes a functional resource for the system that generates it, rather than an unintended side effect.

References

Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648

Elhai, J. D., Yang, H., Rozgonjuk, D., & Montag, C. (2020). Using machine learning to model problematic smartphone use severity: The significant role of fear of missing out. Addictive Behaviors, 103, 106261. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2019.106261

Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Palgrave Macmillan.

Marmot, M. (2020). Health equity in England: The Marmot review 10 years on. BMJ, 368, m693. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m693

Tarafdar, M., Cooper, C. L., & Stich, J. F. (2019). The technostress trifecta — techno eustress, techno distress and design: Theoretical directions and an agenda for research. Information Systems Journal, 29(1), 6–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/isj.12169