CeleryKills

How social media, cult tactics, and religion converge on cognition, meaning, and mental health

Yesterday morning, I went back to my science feed and I got to read Kathryn Hulick’s article “The truth about brain rot, according to science” in ScienceNews. And then of course went through the citations… because that’s important, and it reveals what was not said.

The phrase “brain rot” lands like a joke you admit only halfway, the way you might confess to eating cold leftovers straight from the fridge. The Science News article treats it that way too, as a vernacular label for something messier: cognitive fatigue, fractured attention, and the slow attrition of focus under constant digital stimulation (Hulick, The truth about brain rot, 2026). I keep thinking about how that feeling creeps in during my own scrolling, not as a dramatic collapse but as a thinning. A page load, a clip, a notification, another. The mind doesn’t break so much as it drifts out of its own hands.

Attentional Control Theory gives this drift a shape. Anxiety, in that model, weakens the top-down system that holds goal-directed attention steady and lets stimulus-driven input take over (Eysenck et al., Attentional Control Theory, 2007). The digital environment seems to mimic that imbalance without needing anxiety as a trigger. The feed is already stimulus-driven by design. It does not ask you to maintain focus. It asks you to surrender it, one suggestion at a time. I sometimes notice my own inhibition slipping, not in crisis but in increments. I opened my phone for a weather check and found myself three layers deep in unrelated fragments. Why that particular descent feels so easy is the question that lingers after the fact.

Neuroplasticity complicates the story. The brain reorganizes itself according to repeated experience, strengthening some pathways while weakening others (Ortega Esteban, Neuroplasticity and Internet, 2025). That is not a metaphor. It is routine biology. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for working memory and executive control, is not fixed in its habits. Constant digital switching nudges it toward rapid transitions and partial encoding, while the reward system becomes more sensitive to immediate feedback (Chen et al., Neuroplasticity and Digital Media, 2025). I have felt this in meetings where I can track the main argument but struggle to hold onto its edges. The thoughts arrive, but they don’t stay long enough to be used.

Now shift the frame. Imagine replacing “social media” with “cult.” Not in the sensational sense, but in the structural one. Small cults, historically, rely on internal reinforcement, narrowed information flow, and high-frequency behavioral repetition. The same logic appears, attenuated and distributed, in social platforms. The group is no longer bounded. It is algorithmic. The identity is no longer assigned. It is assembled.

Social Identity Theory helps map that shift. People construct themselves through group membership, sorting into in-groups and out-groups, and then aligning behavior with those categories to maintain self-esteem (Tajfel & Turner, Social Identity Theory, 1979). The minimal group experiments showed how little it takes, a label alone, to trigger favoring “us” over “them” (Psychology Notes HQ, Social Identity Theory, 2026). On social media, labels are everywhere, but they are fluid and often contradictory. You are simultaneously a fan, a critic, a member of a micro-community, and an observer of all three. Which identity do you defend when the feed shifts? Which one gets to stabilize your attention?

Organized religion complicates this comparison in a different way. It is also a system of identity formation, but one that tends to anchor attention in slower rhythms. Rituals repeat, but they do so with structure rather than acceleration. The cognitive demand is not constant switching but sustained engagement, sometimes even silence. I grew up near a small congregation in the Pacific Northwest, the kind that meets in a modest hall with a parking lot that fills and empties in predictable cycles. The quiet after service felt like a pause button pressed on the mind. There was no algorithm waiting to re-engage you. The attention had nowhere to go except inward or outward into conversation.

Contrast that with the digital model. The “brain rot” narrative often claims that social media is making people stupid. That is too blunt. The article itself suggests something more subtle, that excessive exposure to shallow content can reduce attention span and memory retention while increasing anxiety (Hulick, 2026). The exaggeration is the idea of permanent damage. The reality is more procedural. Attention adapts. It learns what to do with itself. If the environment rewards rapid reward cycles, attention learns to chase them.

But the cult analogy raises its own exaggerations. It is tempting to argue that digital platforms exert a kind of covert control, as if users are unwitting participants in a unified system. That is not quite right. The power is not centralized. It is distributed across countless micro-interactions. I have watched myself refresh a feed not because I believe in it, but because the act has become a reflex. That reflex is not indoctrination. It is habit compounded by design.

The religious model can also be misread. It is not immune to attention capture. Anyone who has sat through a service while mentally drifting knows that. Yet its structure encourages a different kind of attentional control, one that resembles the compensatory effort described in Attentional Control Theory. Even when anxiety impairs efficiency, individuals can maintain performance by exerting more effort (Eysenck et al., 2007). Religious practice often builds that effort into its rhythm, repetition, reflection, restraint. The question is whether that restraint produces clarity or merely a different form of narrowing.

Social media, cult behavior, and organized religion converge around identity and attention, but they diverge in how they organize each. The cult model compresses attention into a single narrative. The religious model structures attention over time. The digital model fragments attention across competing stimuli. Each produces its own version of cognitive control, its own version of vulnerability.

Across popular literature, social media is often framed as a kind of attention trap that amplifies anxiety and depressive symptoms through constant comparison, variable reward loops, and social validation pressure. That framing is not entirely misplaced, but it is imprecise. Large-scale studies do show associations between heavy use and increased depressive symptoms and anxiety, especially among adolescents, though effect sizes are modest and context dependent (Keles, “A systematic review: the influence of social media on depression, anxiety and psychological distress,” 2020; Orben & Przybylski, “The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use,” 2019). What the data actually suggests is less a deterministic harm and more a susceptibility amplifier. Social media tends to potentiate existing vulnerabilities, particularly where rumination, social comparison, or sleep disruption are already present. Let’s keep returning to this idea: it doesn’t create pathology so much as it lowers the threshold for it to express.

Cults operate through a different but structurally familiar mechanism: attentional narrowing combined with identity fusion. The psychological literature is clear that high-demand groups often employ techniques such as controlled information flow, emotional coercion, and reinforcement of in-group boundaries, which can increase dependence and reduce autonomous critical evaluation (Lalich & Tobias, “Take Back Your Life,” 2006; Singer, “Cults in Our Midst,” 2003). In clinical contexts, these dynamics are associated with heightened anxiety, dissociation, and in some cases trauma-related symptoms after exit. There is no single “cult brain state,” but rather a pattern of cognitive load and social isolation that can intensify preexisting conditions. From my perspective, what stands out is how attention becomes monopolized. The environment doesn’t just influence thought, it constrains what can be thought about.

Organized religion sits in a more heterogeneous position. Populist narratives often reduce it to either protective or harmful, but the empirical picture is mixed. Religious involvement is correlated with lower rates of some forms of depression and substance use, likely via social support, behavioral structure, and meaning-making frameworks (Koenig, “Religion, Spirituality, and Health,” 2012). At the same time, certain religious contexts contribute to distress, particularly when they involve guilt-focused doctrine, social exclusion, or fear-based control, which can exacerbate anxiety and obsessive thinking. These effects are not uniform across traditions or individuals. I’ve seen how the same structure that provides stability for one person can function as cognitive rigidity for another. It depends heavily on fit, not just form.

The overlap becomes more visible when we consider how these systems now interpenetrate. Social media has absorbed cult-like tactics through algorithmic reinforcement, parasocial bonding, and influencer-driven authority structures that mimic charismatic leadership without formal boundaries. At the same time, both fringe religious movements and high-control groups use social platforms to recruit, normalize doctrine, and maintain contact, effectively extending their attentional reach beyond physical space (Hassan, “Combating Cult Mind Control,” 2015). Even mainstream religious institutions have adapted by using the same channels for engagement and retention, which introduces the same feedback loops of visibility and engagement optimization. There’s a convergence here that feels less like alignment and more like competition for cognitive bandwidth.

A concrete example shows how this normalization happens almost invisibly in a feed. I’ve seen posts circulate that read like this:

“The evidence for a young Earth is overwhelming. Carbon dating assumptions are wrong, and the fossils were laid down in a global flood. Here’s a short video explaining it.”

The structure matters as much as the claim. It’s clipped, confident, and pairs a simple certainty with a call to engage the next piece of content. Comments underneath often mirror the same tone: “This finally makes sense,” or “Why don’t they teach this in schools?” The repetition across accounts, the shared phrasing, and the quick transition from doubt to affirmation create a sense that the doctrine is not only accepted but already widely agreed upon. I notice how the algorithm tends to surface similar content once you pause on one of these posts, reinforcing the impression that this viewpoint is both coherent and ubiquitous. That’s not persuasion in the traditional sense; it’s ambient reinforcement that gradually shifts what feels normal to think.

All three systems can act as modifiers of psychological conditions rather than simple causes. Social media may intensify anxiety through hypervigilance and intermittent reinforcement; cult environments can deepen dissociative or trauma-related symptoms through sustained pressure; and religious contexts can either buffer or aggravate depressive states depending on whether they foster connection or fear. Psychosis is less commonly caused but can be triggered or exacerbated in vulnerable individuals when belief systems become rigid, immersive, and socially reinforced. The common thread is not content but structure: how attention is allocated, constrained, and repeatedly reoriented. I find myself thinking that the real variable isn’t belief or platform alone, but the degree to which a system monopolizes interpretation of experience. That’s where vulnerability accumulates.

I find myself asking where my attention actually resides. Is it in the task I chose or in the next thing that might appear? When I switch between tabs, am I exercising control or outsourcing it? And if my sense of self is partially built from the groups I inhabit, as Social Identity Theory suggests, what happens when those groups are not stable but algorithmically reassembled every few seconds?

The incomplete answer is that all three models describe how attention is shaped by environment, whether through social reinforcement, ritual structure, or digital architecture. The more uncomfortable answer is that none of them fully capture the lived experience of oscillation between control and drift. I notice this most in small moments: the urge to check the phone mid-conversation, the brief hesitation when a notification appears, the quiet recognition that I have lost a thread I meant to hold.

Maybe the question is not whether digital life is making us worse, but what kind of attentional habits we are training ourselves to accept. And if those habits echo the same mechanisms that govern identity in cults or religion, what does that say about the boundaries between influence and choice? Are we participating, or are we being participated in?

References

• Eysenck, M. W., Derakshan, N., Santos, R., & Calvo, M. G. (2007). Anxiety and Cognitive Performance: Attentional Control Theory. Emotion.
• Hulick, K. (2026). The truth about brain rot, according to science. Science News.
• Ortega Esteban, O. (2025). Neuroplasticity and Internet: How Digital Life Rewires Brain.
• Chen, E. K., Tan, V., Garcia-Tan, K. (2025). Neuroplasticity and Digital Media: Brain Development Implications for Adolescent Mental Health.
• Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior. In Psychology of Intergroup Relations.
• Psychology Notes HQ Editorial Staff. (2026). Social Identity Theory: Why Your Group Memberships Define Who You Are.
• Chou, H.-T. G., & Edge, N. (2012). When exposure to a social networking site leads to heightened social comparison. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.
• Keles, B., McCrae, N., & Grealish, A. (2020). A systematic review: the influence of social media on depression, anxiety and psychological distress. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth.
• Orben, A., & Przybylski, A. K. (2019). The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use. Nature Human Behaviour.
• Gao, J. et al. (2019). Mental health problems and social media exposure during COVID-19. Journal of Affective Disorders.
• Singer, M. T. (2003). Cults in Our Midst.
• Lalich, J., & Tobias, M. (2006). Take Back Your Life.
• Hassan, S. (2015). Combating Cult Mind Control.
• Koenig, H. G. (2012). Religion, Spirituality, and Health.
• Pew Research Center. (2021). Religion and Social Media in America.