Does anyone else remember the hype around the launch of Channel 5 – five whole channels to watch on our singular TV set. It was so exciting and The Spice Girls wrote a song for it, and everyone was counting down. Ah, what a simpler time…
Fast forward to today and we have access to 300+ channels on the average Sky subscription, with over 500 hours of new videos uploaded to YouTube every minute equating to 30,000 hours every hour, and globally we watched 97 billion hours on Netflix in the first six months of 2026…
Then we throw social media into the mix. The research I can find estimates that over 5.4 billion people used social media worldwide in 2025, and platforms like YouTube are extremely close to registering one billion – that’s just one platform with about 12% of the entire world’s population signed up to use it.
The numbers are staggering, and somehow staggering doesn’t even feel like it truly sums up this magnitude of change.
We live in an age where we have access to more information and entertainment than ever before. For context, in 2008 research shows that as humans, we received about 34 GB of information per day, around 4.5 times more than in the 1970s, but with ‘information inflation’, this number has allegedly jumped to more than 16 times higher today.
At this point, these numbers feel so abstract and detached – it’s like my brain can’t keep up.
And while this information is making us more aware and giving us new ways to learn, our attention and our sleep is dwindling. In fact, the phrase "our biggest competitor is sleep" was famously coined by one of the founders of Netflix.
The simple truth is that in this attention economy, the best way to make money is to keep you on their platform, even at the expense of rest; have you ever heard the term, “if you’re not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold…”? This was written on a chat forum by a user in 2010 discussing a free news site, and it is as relevant today as it was then.
The more we are consuming media, the more we can be sold to. And as I write this, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) is currently in court in America due to a landmark federal civil trial over allegations that they intentionally designed their social media platforms to be addictive to children, as part of a four-phase strategy, which is what prosecutors say is hooking young users, holding their attention, harvesting their personal data, and hiding internal research about the resulting mental health harms from the public.
And in terms of harms, outside of the obvious child safety issues, research from the University of Michigan estimates over 210 million people worldwide suffer from addiction to social media and the internet.
It is therefore perhaps little surprise that a recent survey of 2,000 Gen Z and Millenials found that scrolling TikTok is now the biggest disruptor of sleep (29.5%), ahead of stress and overthinking (19.4%)…
So why does this attention economy matter? Because you may be someone experiencing poorer wellbeing and mental health without realising what’s causing it. Perhaps you eat well and connect regularly friends and loved ones, you exercise and generally try to take care of yourself, but sleep is lacking, or your self-esteem is low, or motivation feels hard to find, or happiness feels out of reach…
These are all signs that we are overwhelmed with the amount of information we’re consuming, and it’s not as simple as just minimising usage of social media or streaming sites.
This is where therapy comes in. At its basic level, it is a safe space where you are free from technology for 50 minutes and can connect with another human without judgment. We can then start to unravel some of the thoughts, feelings, and things we tell ourselves when using social media and technology at a pace that you feel comfortable with.
You deserve to feel heard and you deserve to have autonomy over your life, which often we can feel is taking away from us when our attention has been commoditised.