The Double Edge of Connection
As a psychotherapist who specialises in somatic work, I often view social media use through the lens of the nervous system. We can use electronic communication to connect, regulate and self-soothe, but overuse can also trigger us, tip us into dysregulation, and isolate us from the very connection we seek. What is electronic use doing for us? What unmet need is it serving? And what is it costing us? Ironically, I wonder if the answer to all three is the same: connection.
Social media has integrated into day-to-day human communication, and I have integrated it into my practice too. For some, it is the only means of connection they have, and it serves an important purpose in a post-Covid world, functioning well at the intersection of neuro-difference and varying sensory needs. But like all things, it tips into unhealthy territory when it becomes a compulsion, an addiction, costing us time, relationships, our sense of being connected to ourselves and the world outside, and giving us ideas of the world that are hard to bear and not grounded in our own lived reality.
Communication Isn’t the Same as Relationship
Electronic messaging has changed how we communicate because it is not in real time. We can decide when we reply, rehearse it, edit it, even delete things we said. Viewed from its best angle, this can build a feeling of control, safety, and capacity for connection in ways we never get to do in person.
But it is communication, not relational, and we are built for relational connection. True safety happens in relationship, when we co-regulate with the other nervous systems around us. This is why the therapeutic relationship matters, and why AI will never replace the felt, bodily experience of safety. It can satisfy the cognitive, meaning-making side of us up to a point, but it will never co-regulate with us the way a living person will.
How the Body Reads Danger
In Somatic Experiencing (SE), we talk about the eight channels of our sensory system through which we become regulated or dysregulated: what we see, hear, smell, taste, our breath, movement, touch, and sensation. Regulation doesn’t only happen through the brain’s meaning-making, it happens through the body.
If something physically happens to us, we feel it, and it feeds into our meaning-making bottom-up: “I am in danger” feels clear, because I feel it. Watching something online is less clear. We take in traumatic events online, and it starts a process where messages are sent to our brains that we are in danger, and feeling physically anxious or overwhelmed, even though it isn’t happening to us in real life.
Slowing Down: What Therapy Teaches Us
The way electronic communication can be managed is, ironically, mirrored in therapy. We slow down interactions, insert artificial pauses for reflection, and titrate the response. Slowing down allows for natural nervous system pendulation, that essential gap that lets us move between the amygdala’s triggered reaction and the pre-frontal, logical brain coming back online. It’s in that gap that we gain a different perspective, and often make a different decision.
In my practice, I use challenging electronic interactions to practice this pause: noticing what physically happens when a message comes in, or when we watch something disturbing. People often notice, in that gap, that their shoulders are stiff, their eyes are sore, their chest is tight, their breathing shallow, things they hadn’t tended to before. This is where the therapist becomes essential, because nobody wants to feel all this, and it’s usually the point someone reaches for their phone instead. It is unregulated activation.
An SE therapist supports the client to stay with it, to notice the impulse to soothe the eyes, to hold the pain in the chest, to breathe deeper, letting the reaction pass until relief enters the body. And it always does. Then they notice the signs of safety returning: breathing freer, the body looser. A new perspective forms, and an understanding that you can ride out activation next time. Mind and body, working together.
When Screens Feel Like Emergencies
In its negative manifestation, electronic use can cause this same activation and can feel like an emergency in the body. Ever-increasing global atrocities on our screens cause shock and panic in our nervous system. It can feel like a need to be available all the time, to respond immediately, a constant sense of urgency. With enough practice of interrupting cycles of activation, our capacity increases, our default resets, and so does our need to reach for escape routes like our phones.
When I was asked to write this, I reflected on my own electronic use. Real-life connection is a practice we must actively cultivate. I noticed myself recently, after a swim, I’d had to force myself to do, sitting for a long time watching bees go in and out of an underground hive. It took a year to return to that kind of capacity in my body, a deliberate decision to change habits, having realised how immersed in my phone I’d become, and how my inclination to be with people had lowered.
Building Capacity in a Faster World
From a developmental and attachment perspective, I’m curious about how socialisation has changed. Children are now in nursery school much earlier, in collective environments away from primary caregivers. What impact is this having on attachment, on nervous systems, on later anxiety and the need for sensory soothing?
Capacity and connection are key: noticing whether you have the capacity to self-soothe in healthier ways, and whether you have enough connection elsewhere. As the expectation on us to be interactive has increased, our ability to tolerate that connection has lowered. Not everyone is neurodivergent, but everyone has sensory needs, we need look no further than the universal Irish aversion to the “big light.” The life our nervous systems are built for is meant to be slower, and more connected to the natural world, than the world we live in now. It’s not surprising it’s overwhelming, and that we seek regulation through endless doom scrolling.
Where to Start
Breaking this habit is a practice, and it can start as small as you like: sitting outside with a coffee, starting a garden, turning off notifications, leaving WhatsApp groups that were an obvious cause of activation. The science is clear: regulation increases when we connect with nature and with people. Move your body, run, swim, walk. Sit or walk by the sea. Step outside throughout the day, notice the sun on your skin, turn off the big light. Self-soothing is a practice. How you self-soothe is a choice. This is how capacity builds.
In its worst form, electronic use is a chronic distraction, an addiction that needs more serious intervention. For most of us, though, it’s about reflecting, moderating, and making small habit changes. Taking an “orienting towards the good things” approach is often more helpful than framing it as restriction: being kind to yourself, starting to notice what feels good. The antidote to trauma is pleasure.
Karen Garvin is an IACP-accredited psychotherapist and clinical supervisor with specialist training in somatic and trauma-informed therapy. Her work explores how past experiences can shape the nervous system, relationships and everyday patterns of coping.