We talk a lot about digital wellbeing. We talk far less about digital rehabilitation.
That matters, because a growing number of people are not just unhappy online. They are injured by it. Their confidence has been eroded, their behaviour reshaped, and their ability to relate to others weakened. This is not about weakness or moral failure. It is about repeated exposure to environments that reward outrage, passivity, fear, and performative identity over calm thinking and human connection.
If we want healthier online spaces, we need to start treating harm as something people recover from, not something they should simply “log off” and magically overcome.
Victims of online abuse
Online abuse is not just rude messages. It is sustained hostility, humiliation, threats, trolling, impersonation, and public shaming. The harm is behavioural and neurological as much as emotional. People who have been abused online often show clear patterns. They scan for threat. They self censor excessively. They over explain or go silent. They disengage from discussion entirely or respond defensively to neutral input.
Rehabilitation here starts with restoring a sense of safety. That means teaching people how to recognise abusive dynamics early, how to disengage without shame, and how to separate their identity from public reaction. It also means validating that what happened to them was real harm, not oversensitivity.
Practical support looks like moderated spaces with clear rules, slow paced discussion, and visible enforcement. It looks like helping people practise posting without monitoring responses obsessively. It looks like rebuilding trust in their own judgement rather than chasing approval or bracing for attack.
Doomscrolling and low self esteem
Doomscrolling is not curiosity. It is a compulsive behaviour driven by threat monitoring and intermittent reward. The feed trains the brain to expect crisis, comparison, and failure. Over time, this erodes self worth and agency. People stuck in this loop often describe feeling informed but powerless. They know everything that is wrong and nothing they can do. Their confidence drops, their attention fragments, and their sense of personal value becomes tied to visibility and reaction.
Rehabilitation means reintroducing agency. This starts by limiting passive consumption and replacing it with active and intentional use. Not less internet, but different internet.
People need help learning to ask simple questions again. Why am I here? What do I want from this? What does this add to my life today? It also means helping them reconnect with offline competence. Doing things, finishing things, being useful, being present in the real world. Self esteem recovers through action, not affirmation. Pick up a book or go outside for a walk with someone.
Losing the ability to have conversations
Many people have not lost the ability to speak/type. They have lost conversational rhythm. Online communication trains broadcasting, not listening. It rewards speed, certainty, and performance, especially when it’s controversial. It discourages pauses, curiosity, and repair. Over time, people struggle with turn taking, nuance, and disagreement without escalation.
Rehabilitation here is practical and social. People need spaces where conversation is slow, bounded, and human. No pile ons. No ratio chasing. No instant judgement.
Teaching conversation again means practising asking follow up questions, reflecting what someone has said before responding, and tolerating silence. It means learning that not every exchange is a debate or a declaration of identity. Sometimes it is just two people thinking out loud together.
Losing the ability to debate
Debate has been replaced by signalling. Online platforms reward alignment over reasoning. People learn to argue for teams rather than ideas; I see this regularly after the French rugby wins against a country they felt it derserved to win by simply walking onto the pitch. Disagreement becomes threat. Changing your mind becomes weakness. Complexity is punished. The result is not passion but rigidity.
Rehabilitation means separating debate from identity. People need to practise holding views lightly, examining evidence without humiliation, and disagreeing without trying to win.
This can be taught. Structured debate formats help. So do rules like steelmanning the other side before responding, time delayed replies, and explicit permission to revise your position. Debate returns when people feel safe being uncertain.
Other areas of online addiction that need addressing
1. Validation addiction: the compulsive need for likes, replies, and visibility trains people to outsource self worth to metrics. Are you the person who grabs their phone first thing in the morning to see if you got any likes from the meme you posted last night? Is you company being manipulated by marketing gurus whose income depends on you buying into the hype?
2. Outrage addiction is another. Anger becomes stimulating, bonding, and addictive. Calm starts to feel boring. You might even feel that unless you too are screaming against the narrative that you are someone not part of the crowd.
3. Dissociation through endless scrolling is another. People are present but not engaged, informed but not involved. Think about what the social media platforms are serving on a platter: endless z listers who have a moment of fame until they are replaced with an edgier, taller or more vocal person.
Each of these requires the same core intervention. Slowing down. Reducing reward volatility. Reintroducing meaning, effort, and consequence.
How we start having these conversations
We start by dropping moral language. This is not about discipline, laziness, or generational failure. It is about behavioural conditioning in environments designed to capture attention and amplify emotion. We talk plainly about what platforms do and what they reward. We share experiences without ranking suffering.
We create spaces where people can say “this has messed with me” without being laughed at or minimised. Yes this requires us to be vulnerable, but isn’t that what being a human is all about?
We also stop pretending that awareness alone is enough. Rehabilitation requires practice, structure, and community. Just like any other behavioural recovery. For some, this change can take place within a few weeks, for others, it can take months. If you are supporting someone through this, let them walk their path, but it’s OK to keep in touch with real world meet up or pictures of your life to remind them you’re still there, This is a journey that can feel very lonely, so it’s good to know that others see you and are there when you need them.
The goal is not to abandon the internet. It is to relearn how to be human while using it.
References
Royal Society for Public Health. Status of Mind report.
Ofcom. Online Nation and Online Harms reports.
UK Online Safety Act 2023 guidance and impact assessments.
Jonathan Haidt. The Anxious Generation.
Shoshana Zuboff. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Cal Newport. Digital Minimalism.
American Psychological Association. Social media and mental health resources.
Centre for Countering Digital Hate. Online abuse research.
