You know that feeling when you’re lying in bed, one last scroll through your phone before sleep? That innocent-seeming habit might change more than just your bedtime – it could be rewiring how our society thinks.

Disclaimer: Human beings are perpetual students, constantly learning and adapting to the world around them. As designers, we are students of humans – observers of behavior, seekers of patterns, and interpreters of how people interact with the world. I am a designer, which means I spend my days studying how humans engage with technology, content, and each other. What follows is not an expert proclamation but rather an observation from someone who has spent considerable time watching how design choices influence human behavior, particularly in those quiet moments before sleep when our minds are most receptive to influence.

71% of people are in the habit of scrolling the internet before bed, according to this crazy study. Let me explain why this matters more than you might imagine.

First, we need to understand what happens to your brain during those drowsy moments before sleep. When you’re in that twilight state between wakefulness and dreams, your brain enters what neuroscientists call a “theta state.” Think of it like your mind’s front door being left wide open – everything that comes in gets direct access to your subconscious, without the usual security checks your conscious mind provides during the day.

This is where things get fascinating. During normal waking hours, when you encounter extreme or polarizing content, your rational brain acts like a bouncer at a club – it checks IDs, questions suspicious characters, and maintains order. But during that pre-sleep scroll? The bouncer’s off duty. Everything gets in: the angry political rants, the oversimplified hot takes, the us-versus-them narratives that dominate our feeds.

Researchers like Joe Dispenza and Bruce Lipton have spent years studying this phenomenon. They’ve discovered that this twilight period is actually when your brain is most susceptible to programming and reprogramming. It’s like your mind is wet cement during these moments – whatever impressions you receive tend to stick and harden overnight.

Now, let’s consider what we’re typically consuming during these vulnerable moments. Social media algorithms are designed to keep us engaged, and they’ve learned that nothing grabs attention like content that triggers strong emotions. Studies show that posts provoking moral outrage or strong emotional responses are shared up to 20% more than neutral content. So, what does the algorithm serve up during your bedtime scroll? Not thoughtful, balanced discussions. Instead, you get the most provocative, divisive content of the day.

Think about this cycle: You scroll through increasingly extreme viewpoints while your brain is in its most programmable state. These perspectives slip past your usual mental defences and settle into your subconscious. Night after night, this process repeats. Your brain, through a property called neuroplasticity, literally rewires itself to accommodate these new thought patterns. It’s like wearing a path through grass – each time you walk the same way, the path becomes more defined.

The crazy thing is this isn’t just happening to you – it’s happening to millions of people simultaneously. Every night, vast portions of the population are unconsciously absorbing increasingly polarized worldviews. We’re all being nudged toward the extremes, one bedtime scroll at a time.

The implications are staggering when you consider the scale. Billions of people worldwide use social media, and studies suggest that over 70% of users check their phones within an hour of going to bed. That’s billions of minds in their most impressionable state, being fed content specifically designed to provoke strong emotional reactions.

This creates what systems theorists call a “reinforcing feedback loop.” As our minds become more polarized through this nighttime programming, we begin to engage more with extreme content during our waking hours. The algorithms notice this engagement and serve up even more polarizing content. Content creators, seeing what gets attention, produce increasingly extreme material. And every night, as we scroll through this intensified content in our vulnerable theta state, the cycle deepens.

The economic incentives make this situation even more complex. Social media platforms make more money the longer they keep us engaged. Content creators earn more when their posts get more interaction. News organizations get more clicks from provocative headlines. Everyone in the system is incentivized to keep us scrolling, especially during those precious pre-sleep moments when we’re most susceptible to influence.

Understanding this mechanism reveals why traditional approaches to addressing polarization often fall short. Fact-checking and rational debate are important, but they target our conscious, waking mind. Meanwhile, our collective worldview is being shaped in the twilight hours when those rational defences are down.

So what can we do about this? The solution starts with awareness. Once you understand how your pre-sleep routine might be programming your mind, you can make different choices:

1. Consider implementing a “digital sunset” – a time when you stop consuming social media for the day, giving your mind time to process and return to baseline before sleep. If you must use your phone before bed, try switching to non-social content like instrumental music or nature sounds.

2. Platforms could help by designing “night mode” features that not only adjust screen brightness but also filter out potentially polarizing content during evening hours. They could promote more balanced, thoughtful content during these vulnerable periods.

3. More broadly, we need to recognize that what we consume before sleep isn’t just a personal habit – it’s a public health issue. Just as we’ve developed guidelines about screen time for children, perhaps we need recommendations about content consumption before sleep.

Perhaps the most unsettling part of this whole phenomenon is its invisibility. We don’t see the subtle rewiring of our minds happening in those drowsy moments before sleep. We don’t notice our perspectives gradually shifting toward the extremes, any more than we notice ourselves aging when we look in the mirror each morning. Like the proverbial frog in slowly heating water, we’ve acclimated to a world of increasingly polarized thinking, one nighttime scroll at a time.

But here’s a thought that keeps me up at night: What if the solution to our divided world isn’t in grand political gestures or sweeping policy changes, but in the quiet moments before we close our eyes? What if healing our collective consciousness starts with being more mindful about what we let into our minds when they’re most vulnerable? Every night, as billions of us lie in bed with our phones, we have a choice – to feed our minds more conflict and division, or to give ourselves space to remember the nuance and complexity that makes us human.

Maybe the path back to understanding each other doesn’t run through heated debates or viral tweets. Maybe it runs through our bedrooms, through the conscious decision to put down our phones and let our minds settle into the kind of quiet that makes room for complexity. Because in the end, the world doesn’t become polarized in dramatic moments of conflict – it happens in the subtle, silent moments when we’re not paying attention.

What will you choose to feed your mind tonight?