657: What Dating Apps + Social Media Are Doing To Our Brains with Shannon Algeo
Highest Self Podcast®
Sahara Rose
4.8 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2026
⏱️ 93 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We are all in a very toxic relationship right now. And nobody is talking about it.
Could our phones be changing the chemistry of our brains, how we date, how we relate and how we connect? And are most of us too addicted to even notice? In this episode I sit down with my longtime friend Shannon Algeo, therapist and author of The Power In Your Hands, to have the conversation we all desperately need to be having.
From dating apps and attachment styles to social media, AI and why an entire generation is having less sex than any before them, this is one of the most important episodes I have recorded in a long time.
In this episode we explore:
📱 How smartphones qualify as a behavioral addiction for almost everyone who owns one
💔 Why dating apps create the same intermittent reward pattern as an abusive relationship
🧠 What social media is actually doing to our attention spans memory and empathy
👀 Why Gen Z is having the least sex of any generation and how phones are connected
🎭 The e-persona and why so many people on dating apps never actually want to meet
🌿 What 40 hours completely offline does to your brain and how to actually do it
📵 Practical tools to reclaim your attention and break free from phone addiction
💞 Why deeper relationships are the meaning of life and how our phones are blocking us
This is a perfect episode to meet up with your friends, tune into the episode and put your phones down together.
Follow Shannon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shannon.algeo/
Get Shannon's book: https://www.shannonalgeo.com/book
Shannon M. Algeo is a Registered Associate Marriage and Family Therapist (AMFT 139516) and Registered Associate Professional Clinical Counselor (APCC 13859) in the state of California. He is employed by Ojai Marriage and Family Therapy Inc. and is supervised by a licensed clinician.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You ever see those couples at restaurants and they're just not talking both on their phones and you're like, I pray to God, I'm not that one day. It makes me so pained in my body. You're in a relationship with our phone and the average person is spending 61 to 80 days per year on it. Damn, that's a lot of vacation time. I could have taken off. It's two to three months of vacation a year. This is two to three months of human power that every human being is losing. We're missing our whole lives. Are these phones fucking up |
| 0:25.6 | our brains permanently? Oh, fuck. I'm the one I've been waiting for. Close flow, soon to let go. |
| 0:38.3 | Trust flow, surrender, let go. |
| 0:40.6 | Trust flow, surrender, let go. |
| 0:42.9 | I'm the one I've been waiting for. |
| 0:47.1 | Welcome back to the highest self podcast. |
| 0:50.1 | Here we love to talk about spirituality, but make it modern, fun, grounded, and relatable so it can |
| 0:55.4 | actually serve your needs. And I think the biggest thing that is blocking our connection to |
| 1:00.5 | our intuition, to our deepest love, pleasure, purpose, fun, freedom, all the good shit that |
| 1:07.0 | we're looking for is this one damn thing that we're so addicted to, but we can't walk away |
| 1:12.1 | from our phones. And I'm not going to lie to you guys. I'm just going to use this to a little |
| 1:16.6 | therapy session. I wake up and I check my phone. I wish I was one of those people who had the one |
| 1:21.6 | hour morning routine and the phones in Alaska and then I like happened to look at it. But no. |
| 1:30.0 | And it's something that, you know, I tell I tell myself I'm like but I'm looking at positive things I'm looking at quotes I'm playing YouTube |
| 1:34.3 | affirmations but it still is this instant direct like I feel like I need to know who messaged |
| 1:42.7 | me I need to know who emailed me I need I need to know who emailed me. I need to be plugged |
| 1:45.6 | in, right? Because I, something in my brain is tricking me that there is a belonging in a community |
| 1:51.6 | that is living in my phone when I'm not paying attention to what is just right outside of my own |
| 1:56.8 | home. And I've noticed this phone addiction. I would say it's, you know, I don't have an |
| 2:03.0 | addictive personality, but I would say this is an addiction. And it's one that I think all of us |
| 2:08.9 | are addicted to. And it's so normalized, right? Because we think something's normal, |
| 2:15.3 | if everyone else around us is doing it, but this is, this is unprecedented. |
... |
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