The Algorithm Knows What Keeps You Engaged — Not What Keeps You Well
Modern Literacy for Your Mental Health
In the United States, May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and as this month draws to a close, this seems a good time to discuss how digital and media literacy can support good mental health practices.
Digital and media literacy are no longer solely about identifying misinformation or evaluating sources — they are also about protecting cognitive and emotional well-being in environments engineered to capture attention, amplify outrage, and reward emotional reactivity.
“Digital wellness” has recently emerged as an application of media literacy skills both in and out of the classroom, with parents, teachers, and caregivers of all ages. It also applies to older adults, as we consider the impact of screen time, cyber scams, and social well-being.
Information Environments Are Psychological Environments
We often treat media consumption as passive, but information ecosystems shape our emotional states. These feeds are not neutral streams of information; they are emotionally-driven environments.
Social media algorithms, in general, work to capture and keep the user’s attention for as long as possible. The longer one’s eyeballs can stay glued to a brightly lit screen with high-res colors, videos, and of course, advertisements, the more tech companies can profit from our political outrage, anxiety, depression, and every less-than comparison.
How else can social media and other screen time affect one’s mental health?
Bright lights and constant notifications prevent good sleep hygiene.
Social media may encourage individuals from expressing themselves in ways that they typically wouldn’t in real life.
Social media and anxiety are co-dependent, especially for the adolescent brain, which is still in development. Teenagers may compare themselves to what they see online, including appearance, academic performance, friendships, or achievements, increasing the likelihood of low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, body image concerns, and/or self-harm.
That’s not to say there aren’t positive attributes to life online. We live in an interconnected world, and our ability to stay in communication with one another across time, distance, and age is a huge benefit. There is also a wealth of mental health and digital or media literacy resources available online if we just take a moment to look for what we need. Someone or something is typically there to help.
As with everything, balance is required.
Media Literacy Is More Than Fact-Checking
Media literacy is the ability to:
Decode media messages (including the systems in which they exist);
Assess the influence of those messages on thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; and
Create media thoughtfully and conscientiously.
Media literacy is the foundational umbrella term for a range of competencies that enable individuals to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act across all forms of communication. It encompasses skills needed to understand media’s influence, distinguish credible sources, and responsibly create media in today’s digital world.
These skills are more than simply fact-checking the nightly news or understanding which of those social media influencers are actually peddling fake supplements. Media literacy, along with digital literacy, includes understanding and interpreting AI, its uses and misuses, as well as how the media can be used for propaganda or when subtle bias is meant to persuade or mislead the audience.
This includes:
Recognizing media manipulation
Understanding algorithms
Identifying emotional framing
Knowing when disengagement is healthy
In Information Literacy, we would ask:
Is this source objective?
Is this information accurate?
Is this information verifiable?
Does this source have bias?
Consider your own Emotional Literacy:
How does this content make me feel?
How often do I engage with content that makes me feel angry/sad/less-than/depressed/anxious?
Is what I’m engaging with positive or uplifting?
If I lost my phone/devices, could I go 24 hours, 2 days, or 4 days without engaging with social media, gaming, etc.?
Do I (can I) take regular breaks from social media and not experience separation anxiety (and not experience backlash from friends/online community)?
Research indicates that media literacy serves as a powerful tool for improving health literacy and fostering healthier behaviors among young people. By applying critical thinking skills to media consumption, individuals can build resilience against negative mental health outcomes such as eating disorders, poor body image, and depression.
Furthermore, integrating media literacy into specific educational areas — such as “porn literacy” to challenge harmful gender attitudes, substance abuse prevention, and violence reduction — has proven effective in reshaping attitudes and guiding better decision-making. Essentially, equipping youth with the ability to deconstruct media messages acts as a protective factor across a wide spectrum of physical and mental well-being.
Attention Is a Mental Health Resource
Our attention spans are not inexhaustible; they are finite and vulnerable. Attention spans are not just a productivity tool. It’s a psychological resource.
Every notification, headline, outrage cycle, breaking news alert, algorithmic recommendation, and endless scroll competes for a finite pool of cognitive and emotional energy. Yet modern digital environments are rarely designed around human well-being. They are designed around engagement.
Most people understand that misinformation can influence beliefs. Not everyone recognizes that information overload can influence emotional stability. Constant exposure to emotionally charged content can create a state of perpetual cognitive vigilance. The mind never fully settles because the feed never truly ends. In this environment, doomscrolling becomes more than a bad habit. It becomes a feedback loop.
The user searches for information to reduce uncertainty or regain a sense of control, but the platforms delivering that information are often engineered to maximize continued engagement rather than to resolve it. The result is an experience where consumption rarely produces clarity. Instead, it produces accumulation: more context, more outrage, more crisis, more emotional noise.
Over time, this can create a subtle but persistent form of exhaustion. Not simply from “being online,” but from existing in a continuous state of informational alertness.
Media literacy plays an important role here because it encourages people to examine not only the credibility of the information they consume, but also the conditions under which they consume it. It asks different questions:
Why is this content being amplified?
What emotional reaction is this designed to provoke?
Is this informing me, or simply keeping me engaged?
Am I learning something meaningful, or am I trapped in compulsive consumption?
These are not just literacy questions anymore; they are mental health questions.
Being informed matters. Civic engagement matters. Staying connected matters. But there is a difference between awareness and overexposure. There is a difference between engagement and emotional saturation.
Healthy digital literacy increasingly requires recognizing when attention itself needs protection.
Because in an information environment built to capture attention at all costs, preserving the ability to think clearly, think critically, and regulate emotions may be one of the most important forms of self-care available to us.
Healthy Digital Literacy Practices
Digital literacy significantly enhances well-being by fulfilling three core psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and social relatedness. By equipping children with the skills to recognize healthy technology habits, exercise conscious choice, and think critically about media, digital literacy fosters self-awareness and resilience.
It empowers young people to understand the mechanics of addictive design, identify hidden agendas, and navigate online social dynamics with empathy and safety. Ultimately, this education helps individuals establish firm boundaries around privacy and behavior, transforming passive consumption into empowered, intentional engagement with the digital world.
Let’s look at some best practices across three areas:
Information Evaluation:
Cross-reference sources: Examine multiple sources to determine what sources are reliable and who you can trust as an expert.
Spot Misinformation: Use critical-thinking frameworks (such as evaluating Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose) to detect commercial bias or false data. [More on these tenets of Information Literacy coming soon!]
Understand Algorithms: Recognize that social media feeds and search engines tailor content to your viewing habits. Actively seek out diverse perspectives to avoid echo chambers.
2. Privacy and Security:
Audit Personal Data: Regularly review app permissions and social media privacy settings. Limit the amount of personal or identifying information shared publicly.
Practice Good Cyber Hygiene: Use strong, unique passwords or a trusted password manager, and enable two-factor authentication (2FA) across your online accounts.
Secure Your Digital Footprint: Remember that everything you post, share, or search can leave a permanent trail. Treat your digital identity with the same care as your physical reputation.
3. Digital Wellness:
Designate Tech-Free Zones: Establish physical and temporal boundaries (e.g., no phones at the dinner table or during the hour before sleep) to stay present.
Curate Your Feed: Mute, unfollow, or block accounts that provoke anxiety or consistently spread negativity. Intentionally seek out uplifting or educational digital communities.
Monitor Screen Time: Use built-in device features (like Apple Screen Time or Android Digital Wellbeing) to track daily usage and set app-specific time limits.
Conclusion
These best practices aren’t solely for Mental Health Awareness Month, of course. But May is a good reminder of the responsibility we have to ourselves and each other to shore up our defenses against the algorithms fighting for every second of our attention.
The modern information environment does not simply shape what we know; it increasingly shapes how we think, feel, and respond to the world around us. Constant exposure to urgency, outrage, fear, and emotional overstimulation can influence attention spans, stress levels, emotional regulation, and even our sense of stability or optimism.
Over time, the cumulative effect of this exposure can erode emotional resilience, making it more difficult to process information thoughtfully, recover from stress, or disengage from cycles of anxiety and reaction.
In a world competing relentlessly for our attention, modern literacy may ultimately become less about mastering information and more about protecting the mind from the information it consumes.
This post hit me, wow. Super relevant and many thanks 🙏