Same Pattern, Different Feed

Years ago I wrote about a neighborhood app that convinced me my house was about to be invaded by snakes.

Nothing in my actual environment had changed. No snakes had appeared. No credible threat existed. Only what I'd been reading had changed, and that was enough to send my nervous system into a low-grade hum of vigilance that lasted for days.

I eventually recognized what was happening, wrote about it, and stopped using the app.

The mechanism, however, did not stop. It just moved.

I wrote about that experience here if you want the full story.

The CBT premise, as clean as it gets.

What the snake app illustrated, almost embarrassingly simply, is one of the most foundational premises in cognitive behavioral therapy: our thoughts, not our circumstances, drive our emotional states.

Nothing about my actual life had changed. My neighborhood was the same. My house was the same. The snakes were theoretical. But my thinking had been shaped by what I was consuming, and my emotional state followed my thinking directly and without much resistance.

This is the mechanism we explain to clients constantly. It is sometimes abstract. It is sometimes hard to illustrate in a way that lands without feeling clinical or removed from their actual experience.

It is not abstract anymore.

The algorithm is running the same play.

I wrote recently about GLP-1 commercials and what happens when the algorithm decides our bodies are problems needing solutions, and then delivers that message relentlessly, personally, and with the full force of behavioral science behind it.

Same pattern. Different vehicle. Arguably much higher stakes.

Because the snake app was, in retrospect, almost quaint. A neighborhood forum with an overactive user base. Easy to identify, easy to leave.

The current version is sophisticated, personalized, and nearly invisible. It knows what pauses us. It knows what activates us. It is specifically designed to generate an emotional response...anxiety, desire, inadequacy, urgency...and it is very good at its job.

And our clients are in it. Constantly. Between every session.

The clinical application.

Here's where this becomes genuinely useful in the room.

Ask your clients—not as homework, not as a formal assessment, just as a curious question in the flow of a session—what app, feed, or account leaves them anxious, inadequate, or activated five minutes after scrolling that they weren't five minutes before.

Most of them will know immediately. There will not be a long pause.

And then name it together: nothing about their life changed in that window. Their job is the same. Their body is the same. Their relationships are the same. The only thing that changed was their thinking, shaped by what they consumed, and their emotional state followed.

That is CBT. Not from a workbook. From their own phone, their own experience, their own Tuesday afternoon.

This is the kind of illustration that lands because it isn't hypothetical. It's already happening. You're just giving them language for the mechanism they've been living inside without knowing it had a name.

The diet culture application specifically.

For those of us doing body image work, this has a particular resonance worth naming with clients directly.

The client who scrolls before bed and feels fine, then feels not fine, then can't quite name what shifted...that's the mechanism. The GLP-1 ad that wasn't targeted at them specifically but landed anyway. The before-and-after that showed up between posts from people they actually know and care about. The subtle, cumulative message that their body as it is right now is not quite right.

Nothing in their actual body changed. Only the thinking did.

And the thinking, as we know, drives everything else.

Naming this in the room--clearly, without alarm, with genuine curiosity--gives clients something they can actually use. Not a coping strategy. An understanding. Which is, in the end, what CBT has always been trying to offer.

One more thing worth noting.

We are in the same feeds. The same algorithm knows us too.

Before we bring this into the room with clients, it's worth asking ourselves the same question: what app, feed, or account leaves us activated five minutes after scrolling that we weren't five minutes before?

The answer is worth knowing. Not just for our own wellbeing...though that matters, but because we can't help clients recognize a mechanism we haven't recognized in ourselves.

Dr. Jamie English is a licensed clinical social worker, supervisor, and educator. The DJ English blog explores the inner life of the clinician — the parts of this work we don't always talk about out loud.