Here’s a scenario that I experience in my practice even with a discussion about how technology can interrupt important therapeutic work: A client will be sharing something deeply personal when their phone buzzes with a notification. Despite being engaged in meaningful conversation about difficult topics, they still reach for it and get distracted. It happens to many of us – these interruptions can override even our most important moments. This shows how compelling these systems have become, and it points to there being more going on than just individual habits or choices. Fortunately, there are ways to understand and work with these challenges.
Understanding How Your Apps Work
As a therapist who specializes in addiction, mood disorders, trauma and has a tech background, I see clients caught up in apps and platforms that are incredibly sophisticated. Even people who work in tech struggle to understand how these systems influence them. These everyday apps and platforms we use are sophisticated systems that collect detailed information about your preferences and behaviors to create personalized experiences designed to keep you coming back despite your best efforts to manage usage.
Take Sarah, a marketing manager and mom. She came to therapy because she was spending over five hours a day on various platforms, even though she really wanted to be present with her kids. What she learned was that her digital experience wasn’t random at all. Platforms had built a profile of her based on her interests in parenting content, her past clicks, and the exact times she was most active. She noticed she was most drawn to family-related posts in the evenings when she felt overwhelmed—and the platforms responded by serving her more of that content at those times.
Recent research shows how artificial intelligence and hyper-personalization make these systems even more effective at capturing attention (Kumar et al., 2024; Harvard Division of Continuing Education, 2025).
Building on What Already Works
Many people try approaches like digital detoxes, app timers, and mindfulness. While these strategies have merit, they typically focus on individual willpower rather than understanding how the technology itself is designed to be compelling.
There are established support systems like Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous (ITAA), which has thousands of members worldwide providing peer support. These traditional approaches focus mainly on changing behavior and abstaining from problematic use, but they don’t address the sophisticated attention-capturing systems that make recovery so difficult.
When Sarah first tried digital detoxes, she’d feel great for a few days but then get pulled back in. What made all the difference was combining privacy changes with emotional regulation skills during her digital breaks, plus understanding how the targeting systems actually worked. The platforms had less information to capture her attention with, she had better tools for managing the emotions that originally led her to scroll, and she understood what was happening behind the scenes so she could make more informed choices.
A Different Approach: Interrupting the Flow
Real change requires working on three levels at the same time. This is what I call Integrated Digital Therapy—an approach that helps you regain control over your relationship with technology instead of feeling controlled by it. This means understanding the emotions that drive you to reach for devices, taking back control of your personal data (as much as possible) to reduce the information platforms have to manipulate your feeds, and learning how the attention economy actually works so you can make informed choices about your digital habits.
Level 1: Understanding Emotional Triggers That Drive You and Building New Skills
Most people turn to their devices when they’re feeling anxious, lonely, overwhelmed, or disconnected—the same emotions that drive other addictive behaviors. For some, the pull is also tied to deeper issues like trauma, grief, or depression. A 2025 study of 578 adults found that “emotional regulation and adaptive coping strategies were pivotal in distinguishing digital competency from dependency” (Chen et al., 2025). Supporting this, Quach et al. (2025) found that when people felt emotionally exhausted, they were more likely to spiral into unhelpful online behaviors—further evidence that addressing both surface-level stress and deeper emotional pain is central to digital well-being.
Another powerful but often hidden driver at this level is shame. Many people believe they should have more “willpower” and blame themselves for being unable to step away from their devices. Research confirms that emotional exhaustion and vulnerability don’t just increase digital overuse, but also contribute to negative emotions like anxiety, depression, and lower self-worth (Quach et al., 2025). These feelings reinforce shame and keep people stuck in the cycle.
Studies on social media addiction show similar patterns, where negative emotions like loneliness and stress drive compulsive use (Amirthalingam et al., 2024).
In Integrated Digital Therapy, this level focuses on uncovering the emotional triggers—including trauma, unresolved experiences, and shame—that drive digital overuse, and then teaching regulation skills that reduce the intensity of those impulses while helping clients reframe their struggles as a normal response to system design, not a personal failing.
Level 2: Taking Back Control of Your Data
At this level, the focus is on taking back control of your personal information. Most people don’t realize just how much data their devices and apps collect in the background—location, browsing history, even the times you’re most likely to feel stressed. When you start limiting what they can gather, the algorithms lose much of their pull, and your feed becomes calmer and less manipulative.
Quach et al. (2025) showed that “data vulnerability is negatively related to online well-being” and that proactive privacy steps—not reactive ones—were linked to stronger outcomes.
In Integrated Digital Therapy, this level means making specific privacy changes—adjusting ad preferences, limiting tracking, and using overlooked privacy tools—so clients experience a calmer, less manipulative online environment that reduces emotional triggers in the first place.
Level 3: Understanding How the System Works
Most people don’t understand how the business models behind their apps actually work. Understanding these systems matters because tech companies design apps specifically to capture and hold your attention for as long as possible. In June 2025, the Federal Trade Commission hosted a public workshop titled “The Attention Economy: How Big Tech Firms Exploit Children and Hurt Families.” The event highlighted how design features like autoplay and infinite scroll can unknowingly extend screen time for kids—and it broadened the conversation to include their impact on entire families, not just individuals (FTC, 2025).
Research confirms that these design choices can undermine well-being. Quach et al. (2025) found that when people felt vulnerable about how their data was being used—what the researchers called “data vulnerability”—their overall sense of well-being dropped. Similarly, Novák & Svoboda (2025) highlighted that “knowledge gaps and digital media literacy” around algorithmic personalization leave people more exposed to manipulation.
In Integrated Digital Therapy, this level involves helping clients connect the dots between design, vulnerability, and literacy—so instead of blaming themselves for “weak willpower,” they feel more informed, less powerless, and better able to make conscious choices about their digital use.
What Real Change Looks Like
After three months of working on emotional regulation, setting stronger privacy boundaries, and learning how platforms are designed to hold attention, Sarah’s relationship with technology changed. She still uses digital platforms, but now it’s a conscious choice rather than a compulsive escape. “It’s like someone turned down the volume on some of the noise,” she said. “I can actually think more clearly about what I want to see and do online.”
The Bottom Line
Research consistently supports digital wellness interventions for reducing problematic internet use. Studies in adults show that emotional regulation, privacy behaviors, and awareness of system design all directly shape digital well-being (Chen et al., 2025; Quach et al., 2025; Amirthalingam et al., 2024; Novák & Svoboda, 2025).
At the same time, large-scale evidence confirms that social media overuse can negatively affect younger populations as well. Longitudinal research has linked higher use with poorer mental health outcomes among adolescents (Plackett et al., 2023), and reports from the Digital Wellness Lab (2024) highlight the unique pressures today’s digital environments place on children and families.
If you find yourself constantly distracted by devices, feeling worse after scrolling, or unable to be present offline, you are probably experiencing a systemic issue rather than a personal failing. Research suggests that attention and emotional well-being are increasingly being commodified by tech companies.
Rather than rejecting technology entirely, the goal is helping people reclaim control over how they engage with digital tools. When you understand both external attention-capturing systems and your internal emotional patterns, you can develop more intentional relationships with technology.
This emerging field of Integrated Digital Therapy suggests that our attention and digital autonomy deserve protection and that therapeutic interventions can play a role in reclaiming both.
References
Amirthalingam, S., Lakshmanan, A., Nellai, C.S., et al. (2024). Understanding Social Media Addiction: A Deep Dive. Cureus.
Chen, S., Ebrahimi, O.V., Cheng, C. (2025). New Perspective on Digital Well-Being by Distinguishing Digital Competency From Dependency: Network Approach. J Med Internet Res.
Quach, S., Thaichon, P., Martin, K.D., Weaven, S., & Palmatier, R.W. (2025). Data vulnerability: does privacy protection behaviour improve digital well-being? European Journal of Marketing.
Kumar, S., et al. (2024). The role of artificial intelligence in personalizing social media marketing strategies for enhanced customer experience. PMC Journal of Digital Health.
Novák, J., & Svoboda, P. (2025). Algorithmic personalization: A study of knowledge gaps and digital media literacy. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
Harvard Division of Continuing Education. (2025). AI will shape the future of marketing: Advanced analytics and hyper-personalization trends. Professional Development Review.
Tamayo, A., Sebastián, V., Campusano, C. (2020). The Struggle for Human Attention: Between the Abuse of Social Media and Digital Wellbeing. Int J Environ Res Public Health.
Plackett, R., Sheringham, J., Dykxhoorn, J. (2023). The longitudinal impact of social media use on UK adolescents’ mental health: findings from the UK Household Longitudinal Study. J Med Internet Res.
Digital Wellness Lab. (2024). Impact Report – What Kids Need in Today’s Digital World. Boston Children’s Hospital.
About the Author
I’m a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) and Registered Art Therapist (ATR) with extensive experience spanning technology, finance, and the arts. I spent years at GE Capital as a systems manager, where I automated business processes, built the systems department managing both data and voice communications, and managed M&A integration and analysis. Following that I worked as an independent consultant, designing and creating custom database systems for other companies. Later I worked as a project manager on Wall Street managing new technology implementations, including a major pilot project for a Wall Street company using ITIL frameworks.
This systems background helps me understand the technical side of what my clients are experiencing. I have worked in addiction treatment for many years, serving as clinical director of two treatment centers and developing specialized addiction programs, and have now been in private practice for well over a decade. Specializing in addiction, trauma, anxiety, depression, and digital wellness, I have developed this Integrated Digital Therapy (IDT) approach to help people regain control over their mental health and digital lives by addressing the emotional, technological, and systemic factors that influence our relationships with technology.