We Need to Stop Feeding Our Brains Junk Food

It’s May, which means it’s officially farm share season, and if you know me in real life, you probably already know that this is my favorite time of year. Our family waits patiently (or maybe not so patiently) all winter for it to come back around.

During farm share season, we spend one evening a week at a local farm, sometimes more. The girls love it. They help pick out our produce, grab two dozen eggs from the cooler, and say hi to all the farm animals. Later in the season, we’ll pick our own strawberries, blueberries, and whatever else is ready.

While I love everything about the farm, one of my favorite parts is that I’ve self-imposed a “no-phone” rule. Whenever we go, I leave my phone in the car and detach from everything related to it: the unread emails, my news feeds, and all the writing that still needs to be done. I enjoy the fresh air and farm sounds, completely phone free.

And I’ve started building these “no-phone” pockets into other parts of my life too. Like hikes with the girls (phone stowed away in a backpack), Sunday mornings at service (phone turned off), and playing with the girls or reading before bed (phone in another room). For me, the pull of my phone isn’t really toward scrolling for entertainment. It’s more that I want to scroll through the news, or see if an important email came in, or jot down a thought about something I’m writing before I lose it. The phone in my pocket is a constant low-grade temptation to fill every moment of my life with information-gathering or productivity, and when I have a free minute or a moment of boredom, my hand reaches for it habitually. My “no-phone” blocks are the times I’ve taken that option off the table, and I notice I feel better and less dysregulated nearly every time I do it.

Standing in the farm store yesterday with my phone still in the car, I found myself thinking about how much cultural attention we pay to what food we put into our bodies. We know that a bag of potato chips is less nourishing than a baked potato (even if both technically fill us up), but we pay far less attention to what we put into our nervous systems. Which is strange, because the same logic applies to both.

Ultra-processed foods, including many varieties of potato chips, are engineered to override our body’s satiety signals to keep us eating past the point where we would have stopped if we were eating a more nourishing food, like a baked potato. Algorithm-driven news feeds are engineered the same way. The content that most of us see on our feeds is the content that is optimized to keep us scrolling past the point where our nervous systems have had enough. Posts that evoke strong emotions like outrage or fear perform well because physiological arousal predicts engagement, and engagement is what the system is built to maximize. The system is, essentially, built on dysregulation.

The similarity between ultra-processed foods and our modern information environment is true in other ways too. Humans evolved in environments of relative food scarcity, not environments where thousands of calories sit within arm’s reach in a grocery store aisle. Similarly, our brains evolved in environments of relative information scarcity, where gathering as much information as possible (particularly about potential threats) was adaptive and helped us survive. We did not evolve for limitless access to distressing content about wars and violence happening on the other side of the world, or for influencers screaming at us about politics.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that we should all tune out of the news or politics completely. I’m arguing that we need to be more deliberate about what information we consume, and also recognize that the loudest voices online are often not the voices most worth hearing. They are the voices most optimized for reaching us, which is a very different thing. Algorithmically amplified content tends to be oversimplified and emotionally charged, and the people who are actually thinking carefully and unwilling to perform outrage for the algorithm are mostly not the ones surfacing in our feeds. This means that finding higher-quality information sources usually takes effort, and reading or watching them often takes more time and patience than scrolling does.

It is also important to understand how our brains work within modern online environments. Humans have well-documented cognitive biases that protect our existing beliefs and identities (as I’ve written about in earlier pieces on the persistence of the MAGA movement). When we encounter information that aligns with our pre-existing beliefs, or comes from a creator we already trust, we are unlikely to notice how oversimplified or skewed it might be. Our prior beliefs get reinforced, and we continue to scroll. As a result, I think many of us are losing the ability to identify what high-quality information even looks like.

There is also one more way ultra-processed food and algorithm-driven feeds resemble each other, and it might be the most important one. Ultra-processed food does not just fail to nourish us. It also displaces the food that does nourish us. If we eat a bag of potato chips in the afternoon, we may no longer have an appetite for a more nourishing dinner. Algorithm-driven feeds work the same way. An hour spent scrolling is an hour not spent reading a book, or talking to a friend in person, or sitting outside, or simply existing and doing nothing. These slower, lower-intensity activities are the ones that actually regulate our nervous systems, which is why they are nourishing. The problem is that they don’t compete well for attention with content that has been optimized to hijack our nervous systems.

The most important work in front of us, then, is to start treating our information consumption with the same intentionality we bring to our food consumption. The information environment we’re living in was built to dysregulate us, and we have to build something else on purpose if we want to live a more regulated life.

Of course, recognizing the ways in which our online environment is dysregulating us doesn’t make it easy to change. Online algorithms are highly sophisticated and built to keep us hooked. For this reason, willpower alone is often not the answer, and anyone who tells us to “just try harder” probably hasn’t spent much time studying how these platforms actually work. The more effective approach is to design specific environments and habits that build regulation into our lives. Like leaving our phones out of reach and replacing the time that we would have spent scrolling with more regulating activities. These interventions may seem simple, but they help us take the moment-to-moment choice off the table, which is often the only way many of us are going to make the more nourishing choice.

In this way, regulation is closer to cooking a wholesome meal than opening a bag of chips. It may be more work, but it’s almost always worth it.

For more content like this (but in bite-sized video format), head over to my TikTok (@Dysregulation.Nation), YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram (@DysregulationNation).

And, as always — stay calm, stay connected, and stay regulated.

—Brianna