Digital Hyper-Connectivity
1/28/2026
I’m very proud of our latest textbook about Internet Gaming Disorder published by the American Psychiatric Association, and I hope you take a look, if you’re interested. As a self-proclaimed gamer, it’s important that we get this right. Yes, gaming can be addictive, but my co-editors and I also wanted to highlight gaming’s many benefits. I hope we achieved just that.
For years now, I have been helping patients find a happy medium between dependence on technology and healthy engagement with it. My thoughts on the phenomenon of how tech impacts our lives has evolved over time. That’s what I’d like to discuss today.
At first, I strongly believed that mental health professionals should consider each addictive technology as a distinct entity. What do I mean by that? I originally believed that addictions to online pornography, video games, social media, online gambling, and so on, were so different that they should each be evaluated and treated independently. In other words, I did not want to be worrying about a patient’s TikTok use if we were primary concerned about their addiction to online shopping. The two seemed so far apart, from a mental health perspective, that I believed they deserved their own discussions an interventions.
While I still believe this to be the case (for the most part), I am starting to believe that mental health professionals should also be looking at technology’s impact on our patients as a whole in addition to evaluating each individual technology’s impact on a patient’s mental health.
Here’s an example. Let’s say that I am speaking with a 23-year-old woman whose tech use mainly consists of TikTok, a dating app like Hinge, and who plays video games and watches anime every night on her phone, after work. Perhaps she had been doing well in her career but has recently found herself struggling to advance professionally. Maybe she is also feeling more anxious and doesn’t know why. In searching for a cause and potential solutions, I would discuss the use of each of those apps, games, and services individually to see their impact on her life. I may come away from that discussion believing that no individual app, game, or service is causing the problem. But let’s take a step back and look at the whole picture. While we may find that this patient isn’t using any of these apps or services excessively on an individual level, taken as a whole, we may conclude that technology broadly speaking is intruding on her day (and her mental health) almost constantly. If I were to look at this patient’s phone’s usage statistics, her total daily hour count for each app may seem reasonable, but she may be checking each of these apps every few minutes (or seconds). Clearly, this is not a mentally healthy practice.
To summarize, this patient’s use of each app individually may appear healthy at first, but her daily use of all of these apps so frequently is negatively impacting her life. Viewed through this wholistic lens, suddenly her use of tech does become an issue that we need to work on. Perhaps I would fous on mindfulness practices with this patient and reasonable screen time limits, as well a focus times. I would hope that, over time, her use of tech becomes more moderate and considered. If we were able to achieve this, I have no doubt her anxiety would improve as well. Human brains just weren’t meant to be tethered to screens 24/7.
This global view of technology’s impact on one’s life is sometimes called “digital hyperconnectivity.” It is an increasingly important consideration in mental health treatment.
I am proud to say that I am teaming up with co-editors Petros Levounis MD, MA and Nathan Carroll DO, MBA, MPH to deeply explore this topic in a new textbook, coming from the American Psychiatric Association in late 2026 / early 2027. Stay tuned for more details!
If you would like to discuss how digital hyperconnectivity is impacting your life and mental health, please give me a call at 908 336 5039.
Dr. Sherer
