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The verdict against Meta and YouTube has reignited debate over addictive design and youth social media harm. But according to Harshi Sritharan, clinician and digital dependency expert with Offline.now, one key issue is still being overlooked: digital emotional regulation. Sritharan works with young people and families dealing with the real-life fallout of harmful platform design, including compulsive scrolling, sleep disruption, body-image distress, emotional dysregulation, and conflict at home.
“The goal isn’t to remove technology from their lives entirely,” says Sritharan. “It’s to help young people and their families build healthier relationships with it.” She can speak to why regulating platform design matters, why digital resilience and online emotional regulation should be treated as core life skills, and why simply restricting access without healthier alternatives can push vulnerable youth into harder-to-monitor spaces.
As news coverage focuses on liability and platform accountability, Sritharan offers a frontline clinical perspective on what these harms actually look like inside homes - and what young people, parents, schools, and policymakers may still be missing.
ABOUT THE EXPERT Harshi Sritharan is a clinician and digital dependency expert with Offline.now, a digital wellness platform connecting individuals and families with therapists, coaches, and social workers who specialize in healthier relationships with technology.
Everyone’s heard you’re “not supposed to be on your phone before bed” but what does that actually mean in 2026?
Most major sleep organizations now recommend putting devices away at least 30–60 minutes before bedtime to protect melatonin and help the brain wind down. The National Sleep Foundation and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine both advise turning off screens about an hour before bed; other experts say a 30–60 minute window is the minimum. (Advisory) Research on blue light shows that evening screen exposure suppresses melatonin and delays sleep, especially when you’re scrolling something stimulating. (Sutter Health)
Psychotherapist Harshi Sritharan, MSW, RSW, who specializes in ADHD and digital dependency, puts it bluntly:
“To ensure quality sleep and peak performance—whether in sports, work, or school—avoid using your phone after 11 p.m.” For teens and adults with ADHD or anxiety, she says, late-night doomscrolling is especially brutal: screens keep dopamine and stress high at exactly the time the nervous system should be powering down. Harshi says:
"The quality of sleep determines your level of executive functioning the next day" She also makes an important distinction: if you are on a device in the evening, active use (choosing a show, talking to friends, looking up something specific) is less harmful than passive use:
“Don’t do passive tech use — that doom scrolling, content just being thrown at you,” Sritharan says. “Be more active about your tech use.” That kind of passive feed is more likely to serve up emotionally intense content kids didn’t ask for and aren’t ready to process.
You Don’t Need a Perfect Curfew to See Results The good news: the science suggests you don’t have to quit completely at night to feel a difference.
A JAMA Network Open study on young adults found that reducing social media use for just one week — not going cold turkey — led to about a 24.8% drop in depression, 16.1% drop in anxiety and 14.5% improvement in insomnia symptoms.
Offline.now founder Eli Singer argues that the real challenge is confidence, not willpower. Their data show 8 in 10 people want a healthier relationship with tech, but more than half feel too overwhelmed to know where to start.
The platform’s behavior data also show that late afternoons and evenings are when phones dominate use and when people are actually most motivated to make changes. We have less in the tank at night, don't trust willpower to transition off. Have a system/routine of pre-decided of low-effort (potentially fun) activities to help the transition off phones.
“We tell people: don’t start with a perfect 8 p.m. curfew,” Singer says. “Start with one realistic phone-off window — even 30 minutes before bed — and prove to yourself you can protect that. That first win matters more than an ideal schedule you’ll never keep.” A Simple, Science-Aligned Answer For most people, Offline.now’s experts land on a practical, high-compliance answer to the question “What time should I turn off my phone?”
Aim to put your phone away 30–60 minutes before your target bedtime Make everything after that screen-free by default (books, stretching, music, talking, journaling) If you must be on a device late, keep it brief, low-drama and intentional — no infinite feeds, no emotionally loaded content It’s a small change, but in the context of a day where we’re already on screens for roughly 10 of our 16 waking hours, that last hour matters.
Featured Experts Harshi Sritharan, MSW, RSW – Psychotherapist specializing in ADHD, anxiety, insomnia and digital dependency. She explains how late-night and early-morning phone use hijack dopamine, disrupt sleep and make it harder for kids and adults to function the next day. Eli Singer – Founder of Offline.now and author of Offline.now: A Practical Guide to Healthy Digital Balance. He speaks to the platform’s behavioral data on when people are most ready to change, and how 20-minute micro-experiments (like one phone-off window at night) build real confidence over time. Expert interviews can be arranged through the Offline.now media team.
Most conversations about “screen time” focus on hours. But newer research and what clinicians see in practice suggest how you use your phone may matter as much as how much you use it.
A 2024 meta-analysis of 141 studies on active vs passive social media use found that, overall, effects are small, but there is a pattern: passive use (just scrolling and watching) is more consistently associated with worse emotional outcomes, while some forms of active use (commenting, messaging, posting) show small links to greater wellbeing and online social support. (OUP Academic) Other work from Frontiers in Psychology suggests that the emotional impact of passive use depends heavily on how you feel about the content: when it triggers envy, comparison or negativity, mental ill-being goes up; when it’s genuinely positive, the effect can be neutral or even slightly protective for some users. (Frontiers) Reviews also point to upward social comparison, FOMO and rumination as key pathways linking passive browsing to lower wellbeing. (ScienceDirect)
Psychotherapist Harshi Sritharan, MSW, RSW works with teens and adults who feel “wiped out” by their feeds and draws a sharp line between passive and active tech use:
“Don’t do passive tech use — that doom scrolling, or content just being thrown at you,” she says. “I want people to engage in active tech use. Go and search something up, choose the long-form video you actually want, talk to your friends. Don’t let the app decide everything you see — especially for kids, who are getting content they’re not ready for and didn’t sign up for.” She notes that many of her clients describe feeling “numb, anxious or wired” after long passive sessions, a sign that their nervous system is being pulled around by unpredictable, emotionally loaded content rather than chosen experiences. She also discussed the short term recall related to scrolling:
"Some of my clients can't even remember what content they consumed right after scrolling. However, we know that what we pay attention to and what we show our brains has an impact on our thoughts, mindset, feelings and overall internal world." Offline.now founder Eli Singer frames this as a design problem, not a moral failing. The platform’s research shows people already spend about 10 of their 16 waking hours on screens; the realistic goal is to upgrade some of that time, not pretend we can all go offline. His advice: instead of vowing to “get off your phone,” start by swapping just 20 minutes a day from passive to active use; for example, messaging a friend to meet up, learning something specific, or planning an offline activity.
“When people tell us they feel overwhelmed by their screen habits, it’s not laziness, it’s a crisis of confidence,” Singer says. “We don’t need perfect digital detoxes. We need small, winnable shifts, like taking one block of passive scrolling and turning it into something you actually chose.” For journalists, the story isn’t simply “screens are bad.” It’s that passive, algorithm-driven scrolling is where comparison, FOMO and emotional overload tend to pile up and that helping people change how they use their devices may be more realistic, and more effective, than focusing on raw minutes alone.
Featured Experts Harshi Sritharan, MSW, RSW – Psychotherapist specializing in ADHD, anxiety, insomnia and digital dependency. She helps teens and adults understand how doomscrolling and passive feeds hijack dopamine and mood, and teaches practical shifts toward more intentional, “active” tech use. Eli Singer – Founder of Offline.now and author of Offline.now: A Practical Guide to Healthy Digital Balance. He brings proprietary data on digital overwhelm and the “confidence gap,” and shows how 20-minute “micro-wins” like upgrading one chunk of passive screen time can change people’s relationship with their phones without extreme detoxes. Expert interviews can be arranged through the Offline.now media team.
