Young adults today are increasingly falling into the trap of escaping the processing of their emotions by obsessive internet usage. This essay is part one of a two-part series on how I, as a young adult, have realized this trap and how I escaped its drastically negative consequences.
To begin, let me take you to the catalyst for this quite simple observation. For the past two months I switched my daily phone to a flip phone. I use this fliphone to make calls and text people. I also occasionally carry around my regular iPhone that’s connected to WiFi for apps like slack, outlook, and grubhub (My campus runs on grubhub). Now what that means is that when I’m outside, or in certain areas of buildings that don’t have wifi, I’m left completely alone with the flip phone. Which is basically useless at anything except for calling or texting. So why do I bring this up.
Well I want to ask you, the reader, when was the last time you had a meal completely alone with no phone. When was the last time you went to the bathroom without bringing your phone in. Or the last time you’ve sat completely alone with your thoughts for longer than 10 minutes. If you asked me the last time I consistently spent time alone with no external simulation, the answer would’ve been years ago. Maybe its different for you, but for most young men and women it’s not too much different. None of us can bear to stand our own thoughts for too long.
Let’s go back to third grade Ashwin, when I last spent time consistently unstimulated. This was frankly a great time for me. My biggest problems were about what route to run during recess football and finishing my Kumon homework. My day-to-day life would be waking up around 7:00 AM and getting ready for school. My mom would come and wake me but at that point I’d get ready myself. Then it’s off to the bus where I’d spend the morning commute talking to my friends on the bus. I’d get through school and when I came home, I was greeted with some food and one hour of glorious TV time. If the weather permitted, I’d play outside for an hour or two instead of watching TV. After that I’d clean up, eat dinner, do homework, read, and be off to bed.
Technology wasn’t that huge in 2014/2015 for an 8-9 year old. We had like 5 laptops per classroom and we only used them in limited scenarios. Everything was done on paper and you really didn’t need a phone. Some kids did, others had a flip-phone, but most didn’t.
Why I narrate my day to day life is because you can see there was very little screen time. Phones and computers weren’t too popular and I didn’t need to use them. This meant a lot of the time I was in my own head. My imagination was firing on all cylinders to keep me entertained and any negative emotions that came up I had to deal with it myself or talk it out with my parents. While third grade was generally great the following elementary school years were not as. I was increasingly lonely and on my own (I was a weird kid). Throughout this though there was no internet I could delve into to distract myself or numb the negative emotions. Instead, I’d read books, sit with my thoughts, and try my best to be around other people.
Now let’s look at high school life. In the span of five – six years everything changed. Keep in mind this is after a year and a half of COVID shenanigans. The actual school days are mostly the same except with a laptop in class, I’d more often than not be distracted. Then after school would be hugely different. I’d sit blasting short form content or jumping from video to video on YouTube for around a hour to an hour and a half just to decompress from a busy or stressful school day. Then after cleaning up, I’d sit down to do school work. My classes were not easy, and I’d usually eat dinner while studying. For bedtime I’d scroll through more short form content or videos until I felt my eyes were too tired and go to bed.
The differences I want to highlight here are that I’d never spend time outside. Maybe the occasional walk on a good day but usually I’d be stuck indoors. Also take note how I never spent time alone and in solitude with my thoughts. I’d listen to music or watch Netflix on the commute to school. I had a phone by then and could be entertained when I wanted. Every micro moment I used to have as a child in silence were spent on a phone. Even when waiting in line for a vending machine I (and everybody else) would be on their phones. Finally, when it was time to go to bed I couldn’t even sit still with my thoughts long enough to fall asleep. I’d have to be in bed scrolling until I went to sleep.
Now in a year and a half of college this has catapulted into entirely new levels. I’m embarrassed to admit this but there’s even times I’d whip out my phone while at the urinals. My bedtime procrastination got so bad I’d be in bed at 11PM but would be up online till 5AM. During every meal my phone would be out. I even switched from scrolling to reading the news to try and be healthier, but it did little to change me. Doing any amount of homework felt impossible without stopping every 15 minutes to scroll Reels or Reddit.
It was at this point that things got bad. I wasn’t doing well and after transferring schools, and this obsessive internet usage got worse because I was dealing with stronger feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and a little depression.
I’ve come to realize that I couldn’t handle any sort of negative emotions entering my mind. I had become so dependent on numbing the negative emotions by doing anything but processing them. I’d even go back to reading books like I did in third grade. However, in college I’d stay up till 4AM as a way to avoid these anxious thoughts I’d been having about school and life (it was a rough semester ngl.) I’m not even joking when I say I’d be in bed at 10PM but instead of being with my thoughts for enough of a time to fall asleep I’d instead read till super late into the night just to escape into whatever book I was reading.
“A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.” For me it took close to five years to realize it was processing my negative emotions I was running from.
It works like this. You go on with your life and BAM a thought comes up. It may be a thought of boredom, anxiety, confusion, or something else. This may led to subsequent thoughts that may walk you down a narrow and dark road. You may face these sorts of things hundreds of times a day. Sometimes they may be loops. It may not be that melancholy. It may be a thought of boredom or restlessness. Whatever it may be, these thoughts and your mishandling of them gives way to emotions that you do not want to deal with. That you want to run away from. So what happens? What did I do. I scrolled, I binged TV, I read, I escaped. If you stay aware of your thoughts and what’s going on in your mind before and after you use the internet you’ll realize that before you use the internet your mind is a choppy sea of thoughts and emotions. And after? Your mind goes blank. Its calm. But its not. Its really numb. These tech companies have not made their tech addictive just to exploit you. They’ve made their tech an escape to numb you from the pain of within. You may think that you do process and sort through your thoughts and emotions. However, it may not be the emotions you think of that lead you to obsessive internet usage. It may be boredom, shame, guilt, inadequacy, or insecurity. You may even have a mix of coping with more healthy strategies and obsessive internet usage. These platforms will pull on the slightest twitches of any emotion to suck you in.
Okay so now that I detailed my story, I want to present some research so that you know I’m not talking out of my ass.
[1] shows that those who have a higher belief in their ability to effectively manage their own emotions (known as RESE) “showed significant negative correlations with both psychache and smartphone addiction”
Psychache is intense psychological pain.
There’s even results in this study about those raised in an Invalidating Environment, essentially a childhood where one’s emotions, experiences, and feelings are consistently rejected, being positively correlated to smartphone addiction and even predicting smartphone addiction.
Another study backs this claim up: “RESE was found to have a significant negative influence on mobile phone addiction” [2].
This prospective study surveyed 324 college students in China ages 20-30 (mostly millennial) about their emotional regulation skills and internet addiction two times, one year apart. They categorized the students to initially be internet addicts (IA) or not internet addicts (no IA). Then a year later the IA group was sorted into persistent IA (PIA), basically no change or worse internet addiction a year later; and remitted IA (RIA), internet addicts who became sober after the year. For the no IA group, they were sorted into new IA (NIA), those who newly became internet addicts within the year; and the persistent no IA (PNIA), those who still don’t have an internet addiction a year later.
Here’s what they found:
“Of the 268 participants in the PNIA and NIA groups who had no IA at Stage 1, 20 were deemed to have IA at Stage 2 (the NIA group), resulting in an incidence rate of 7.5%” [3].
“The results revealed that compared with the PNIA group, the NIA group had more severe impulse control difficulties on the DERS at Stage 1, revealing that impulse control difficulties at Stage 1 predicted the incidence of IA at Stage 2 during the follow-up period of 1 year” [3].
So this is an interesting conclusion. Firstly, there’s a incidence rate of ~8%. Meaning 8% of the respondents who didn’t have an internet addiction initially developed one a year later. That’s crazy to me. Another is that impulse control difficulties could predict the incidence of IA one year out from it happening. Someone with poor impulse control is predisposed in a way to internet addiction.
This other study looks at young Italian men ages 18-35 and wanted to see how IA, emotional dysregulation, FOMO (fear of missing out), and social media addiction related [4]. They got the following results:
“The total effect of the DERS score on the IAT score was significant” [4]. DERS is a sense of one’s emotional dysregulation, a higher DERS score meaning greater difficulty in emotional regulation. The IAT is a internet addiction test.
“IA was found to correlate with all the investigated variables, demonstrating a strong and positive relation to social media addiction, FOMO, emotional (dys)regulation, and neuroticism; and a weak and negative relation to conscientiousness” [4].
What’s worse is that being online makes the cycle and framework worse for your internet addiction. “Moreover, all variables were found to significantly relate to each other, supporting the frame of a vicious circle whereby underlying emotional (dys)regulation exacerbates problematic social media use and the pervasive apprehension that others are engaged in exclusive positive activities, resulting in severe IA” [4].
Now one last study on this topic I want to bring up is this paper published by a person way smarter than me almost 13 years covering the same principle [5]. He presents this model of compensatory use. That IA is not from compulsion but. That IA “can be better understood as a coping strategy grounded in understandable (but not always healthy) motivations” [5]. That the crux of the issue is a negative life situation being reacted upon with internet usage. That there is no real compulsion to use the internet, but instead its compensation to alleviate negative feelings. Take for example the link between stress and excessive online gaming by MMO players. The excessive gaming was mediated by escapism, the motivation to play is to escape from the stress [6].
Okay, so now that this link between emotional regulation and internet usage is more defined let me show you that gen z is on the internet a lot more.
According to Pew Research, 20% of teens say they are on TikTok and YouTube “Almost constantly” [7].
US Teens spend an average of 4.8 hours a day on across seven popular social media websites according to a 2023 Gallup poll [8].
Gen Z as a whole has lower emotional intelligence than other generations. [9, p19-20]. Navigating emotions was one of the biggest declines for Gen Z.
Okay so I’ve established bad emotional regulation leads/correlates/and to some extent predicts internet addiction. I’ve also established we’re more internet addicted than any other generation. I’ve also established that we’re worse off at emotional regulation than any other generation.
Now, what I argue is that our poor emotional regulation skills lead us to compensate by problematic internet usage, usually social media. Here, a chicken-egg problem may arise. Was it the social media first that causes us to have such poor emotional regulation skills or was it the initially poor emotional regulation that made us susceptible to internet addiction. To me this doesn’t matter. The mechanism to improve is the same. Strengthen the way you cope so you don’t have to compensate by numbing yourself with the internet.
Now, a note I want to make is that these social media (SM) companies are malicious and have made their platforms addictive. To me though the key difference between people who are addicted to SM and not is very solid and even extraordinary emotional regulation skills. Once you can cope without reaching for your phone a huge internal trigger for you has largely been eliminated. When a “negative life experience” comes up you no longer need to compensate with escapism into the internet.
For me, in my life switching to the flip-phone has slowly provided me with a shield from letting “negative life experience” motivate me to rot on the internet. I spend a lot more time alone and in my own head. This is purely from not being able to “numb” myself with my smartphone because I have no reception, and I really cannot distract myself with my flip phone.
For the first time in years, it finally feels like I’m living a life instead of just witnessing it. Every bit of work is that much easier to get into because I’m not as restless and because I don’t need to compensate for the annoying feeling of starting work by scrolling. I can just sit through it. I eat a whole bunch of my meals in complete silence just observing what’s around me. I walk in between my classes without any stimulation. Any bit of transition time, I spend just bored without taking out my smart phone. I look at sunsets, ducks, architecture… everything. I’m in the present a lot more. I’m in my own head a lot more and this time I’ve found a home within it.
You see now how this was a trap. Without realizing, as I was growing up the initial emotional regulation skills I was building got completely disrupted by the boom in my internet usage, and without realizing I had come out of adolescence with sub-par emotional coping skills. I had to escape the trap by rebuilding these skills I once had. I don’t believe this is unique to me, I think this phenomenon is occurring the world over, and it’s only getting worse. Thus, is called “The Young Man Trap”
Expect Part 2 around Q3/4 of this year with more detail on how exactly to escape this trap without switching to a flip-phone.
Thanks dearly to my friend Omkar for reading an early version of this essay and encouraging me to publish it.
References
[1] Bai, B., Meng, S. & Zhou, J. Invalidating environment and smartphone addiction: the chain mediating effect of regulatory emotional self-efficacy and psychache. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 12, 1981 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-06312-7
[2] Xiao Z and Huang J (2022) The Relation Between College Students’ Social Anxiety and Mobile Phone Addiction: The Mediating Role of Regulatory Emotional Self-Efficacy and Subjective Well-Being. Front. Psychol. 13:861527. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.861527
[3] Tsai, Jui-Kang et al. “Relationship between Difficulty in Emotion Regulation and Internet Addiction in College Students: A One-Year Prospective Study.” International journal of environmental research and public health vol. 17,13 4766. 2 Jul. 2020, doi:10.3390/ijerph17134766
[4] Quaglieri, A.; Biondi, S.; Roma, P.; Varchetta, M.; Fraschetti, A.; Burrai, J.; Lausi, G.; Martí-Vilar, M.; González-Sala, F.; Di Domenico, A.; et al. From Emotional (Dys)Regulation to Internet Addiction: A Mediation Model of Problematic Social Media Use among Italian Young Adults. J. Clin. Med. 2022, 11, 188. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/jcm11010188
[5] Daniel Kardefelt-Winther, A conceptual and methodological critique of internet addiction research: Towards a model of compensatory internet use, Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 31, 2014, Pages 351-354, ISSN 0747-5632, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.10.059.
[6] Scott E Caplan, Problematic Internet use and psychosocial well-being: development of a theory-based cognitive–behavioral measurement instrument, Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 18, Issue 5, 2002, Pages 553-575, ISSN 0747-5632, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0747-5632(02)00004-3
[7] Pew Research Center, December 2025, “Teens, Social Media and AI Chatbots 2025”
[8] Gallup, October, 2023, “HOW PARENTING AND SELF-CONTROL MEDIATE THE LINK BETWEEN SOCIAL MEDIA USE AND YOUTH MENTAL HEALTH” https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/briefs/ifs-gallup-parentingsocialmediascreentime-october2023-1.pdf
[9] Sixseconds, 2024, , STATE OF THE HEART, https://6secus.s3.amazonaws.com/SOH/SOH+2024+Global.pdf
