How Social Media Teaches You to Be Sad—And Tricks Your Brain into Believing It Was Your Idea

I didn’t wake up sad. But somewhere between my morning coffee and waiting to board my train to Rome, I randomly checked Instagram, for the second time, for no reason. Suddenly something shifted. I couldn’t name it, just a low hum of not enoughness. Such a big wave of noise from a tiny screen… And yet, there it was, at my fingertips.

I powered down my phone, not just silenced it—completely off, like closing a door. Then I looked up and let the world outside the window taking over: rolling hills, sun-washed rooftops, olive groves stretching toward the horizon. Italy wasn’t just beautiful at this time of the year but quietly magnificent. And in that quiet, unplugged time, its beauty felt almost unreal. Not like something to be captured on my phone, but something to be treasured in my heart.

It wasn’t until hours later, standing in my hotel room, with my phone face-down on the coffee table, that I realized something important.

Yes, the Pope Francis died, and it is truly a sad event. But he was an old man, I had never met him. I hadn’t known him, spoken to him, or shared even a passing moment of connection. I was back to Rome to cover his funeral, to observe and write.

As I watched thousands of people crying, I found myself wondering: are they grieving him or sadness itself become contagious, spreading from one heart to the next like a kind of energetic wave of sadness, impossible to resist?

Your Brain Is Wired to Predict

Your brain is not built to passively take in the world but built to guess what is going to happen before it happens. That’s how you survive.

Your brain receives fragments of sensory input, images, sounds, patterns and uses your past experiences to try to make sense of them. To predict. To stay one step ahead. The brain doesn’t wait or verify a fact. Its ability to anticipate, treats its guesses as actual facts.

It bridges the distance between what you perceive and what is actually happening with expectation, shaped not by reality, but by what your mind has learned to anticipate.

When you spend more than 20 seconds on social media, surrounded by perfectly framed lives, curated bodies, soft lighting, timed vulnerability and stories that are carefully edited to provoke emotion, your brain starts learning a version of reality that isn’t yours. And when your actual life doesn’t match that predicted version, when it feels quieter, messier, lonelier, your brain assumes something is wrong. Not with the feed but with you.

You are Not Consuming Content. You are Being Trained by It.

Social media doesn’t just show you things. It teaches you what to expect—from others, from the world, from yourself. You might not notice it at first, but over time, your brain begins to anticipate the feeling that comes with every scroll: the brief envy, the subtle inadequacy, the sense that your life is lagging behind in a race you didn’t sign up for.

It trains you to expect disappointment. It teaches you that validation must be earned.
It plants the seed that everyone else is doing better, feeling deeper, living louder. And once that expectation takes root, your brain starts predicting pain, before it happens. That’s what predictive processing means. The sadness you feel when you go online isn’t always a reaction. Sometimes, it’s a rehearsal. Your brain, trained by repetition, preparing you to feel lesser before anything even happens.

Born Creator Turned Consumer

You came into this world wired for creativity. You made up entire worlds from nothing, turned cardboard into castles, asked wild questions no one could answer—and answered them anyway. That raw, untamed creativity is still there, waiting. But social media doesn’t thrive on that kind of originality. It doesn’t ask you to invent, it trains you to replicate. It doesn’t celebrate what’s different, it curates what’s popular and invites you to imitate it.

So, slowly, you start to shift from creator to consumer and believe is your choice. You pay attention to what gets likes. You shape your thoughts, your body, even your voice to mirror what influencers do. And without even realizing it, you begin to consume other people’s lives instead of living your own. You start doubting your ideas before they’re even formed. You look for permission to be what you already are. And then you wonder why you feel empty.

Sadness Has Become a Monetising Strategy

Social media is not accidental. It is engineered, an algorithm.

It tracks what keeps your attention the longest, what you hesitate over, what makes you feel just vulnerable enough to stay engaged. And research has shown, again and again, that sadness, insecurity and self-doubt are powerful motivators. When you feel like you are not enough, you look for something to add to yourself as if you are incomplete. Something to buy. Something to prove. Something to post. And in that moment, you don’t even realize your emotional state was shaped by someone else’s standards. You think it was your choice. But in truth, your sadness was strategically manufactured and sold back to you.

A few years back, I realised that consuming social media is consuming my natural joy of life, my creativity and is reducing the quality of my life. Since I updated my relationship with social media, I have my life back. I’m not saying that you need to divorce your digital world. That would be simplistic. Social media can be joyful. It can be funny, educational, even sacred when used intentionally. But you need to break the circle, set energetic boundaries, step in and remind your brain that it doesn’t get to decide how you feel just because you saw someone else’s highlight reel.

• You can stop starting your day with someone else’s life. If the first thing your brain sees is proof that someone is thinner, richer, or happier, it will assume that is the bar for the day. Replaced your morning scroll with anything that keeps you away from a screen: walking, listening to music or random birds sounds.
• Make things without sharing them. A poem. A playlist. A messy idea. A photo you liked but don’t post. This is a radical act. Not everything you create needs an audience. Sometimes, it just needs self-reflection.
• Watch how often sadness is used on social media as a currency. Online vulnerability can feel like honesty, but sometimes it’s just another virtual performance collecting likes.

You don’t exist to be optimized. Your worth is not a campaign. You are allowed to be unpolished, unseen and still deeply valuable. And when sadness comes, it should be yours.

Let your brain predict better things. Show it something unexpected. Silence. Creativity. Discomfort. Joy that isn’t filtered through approval. Not every emotion you feel was born from your experience. Most of it was sold to you. But now you know and you get to choose differently. You are trained by an algorithm but you are better than that.

This trip helped me understand that endings have a way of making room for something better. As I took in the timeless beauty of Rome once again, I couldn’t shake the question : would these cultural treasures have ever come to life if the Romans had social media? Would their masterful sculptures, or the profound works of philosophy have flourished if their creative energy had been absorbed by the need to consume, to collect likes, to seek approval from a virtual audience?

It is early morning and while my wordcount comes to a close here, I am back this afternoon on how social media tricks your brain into believing it was your idea. Just remember: this obsession with external validation frequently erases your originality. Would ancient Rome have built these magnificent legacies, or would they have been consumed by the noise of their time, chasing trends rather than creating something timeless for future generations?

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