Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast. Today, I want to talk about something

that has happened to a lot of us. Picture this. It is 1115 on a weeknight. You have brushed your

teeth, you have set your alarm, you have every intention of falling asleep, and then you reach for

your phone. Just a quick check. Just to see if

anything happened in the last 20 minutes since you last looked. You open one or two apps. You start

scrolling. The content is not really even enjoyable. It is news you did not ask for, opinions that raise your pulse, videos that vanish

from memory the moment the next one loads. And when you finally put the phone down and look

at the clock, it is 1245, sometimes later. You have lost over an hour. You did not plan to. You

could not seem to stop. And now you have to

wake up in six hours. That behavior has a name now. It is called doom scrolling and the science

of what it does to your sleep. And through your sleep, to your mental health, has become far clearer

in the last few years than most people realize.

So let me walk you through it.

Social media as a concept is younger than most people assume.

The first platform that looked anything like what we would recognize today,

a site where you could create a profile, list your connections,

and browse the networks of others, launched

in 1997. It was called 6 degrees, and it lasted about four years before folding. But the blueprint

it left behind turned out to be one of the most consequential architectural drawings of the digital age. Think of six degrees as a

prototype, a first sketch on a napkin. What followed was a rapid sequence of redesigns, each one

more ambitious, more immersive, and more addictive than the last. Friendster arrived in 2002.

MySpace in 2003.

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