I Tried Living Like a Teenager for One Night

The story of an accidental experiment

The Alarm Bell Experiment (n=1)

On Saturday evening, I did something that was pretty unusual for me. I spent a couple of hours scrolling through social media. Instagram, specifically.

If you know what I write about phones, teen anxiety, and socials… yeah. Pretty unusual.

Two things stuck out.

I remember seeing an (obviously AI-generated) Reel of a professor getting hit with what looked like a water balloon while they were lecturing in a hall. It knocked them down — ragdoll physics — and they popped back up and kept teaching. Obviously fake, but the “teacher” looked shaken.

That pause loaded up more Reels about teachers being attacked in classrooms. I didn’t stop to watch any of them fully, but they rolled past, and I caught flashes of them.

At the same time, I was also seeing a lot of things that produced a completely different reaction — FOMO, or flat-out jealousy:

• Chemistry teachers doing slick demonstrations in front of their classes.

• Small chemistry demos.

• Chemistry teachers in other countries doing things with their kids (clearly younger than my 10th- and 11th-graders) that would be wildly unsafe to do in a classroom here.

• And Steve Spangler, fresh from a preview screening of Project Hail Mary, talking about how amazing it was and how it’s a terrific teacher movie.

As I thought about those two flavors of Reels later, the pairing was pretty obvious.

The seed and the fertilizer.

Fear and comparison.

When the nervous system rings the alarm bell, the mind is going to respond

That night, I had an agita dream. Not a full nightmare, but one of those uneasy dreams that sits on your chest after you wake up.

In it, I was attending a talk given by a friend of my parents who was a teacher. Both my parents were teachers, and this friend — someone I knew as a kid — hadn’t aged a day. Because… dreams.

The talk was about (you probably saw this coming) the rise of violence toward teachers in classrooms. They described an incident that had happened to them, and the talk ended with a VR-style simulation in which police in tactical gear entered a classroom behind a rolling robot weapons platform. Not triggering for a teacher at all.

Again — dreams.

The robots were kind of cool, though.

The dream ended with me crawling on a hill outside the conference hall, picking up pencils that people had tossed there so I could use them in my classroom.

I can only say it so many times — dreams.

I woke up anxious and full of agita, and my Apple Watch confirmed what I already knew: my sleep score was somewhere between lousy and utter shit.

I felt draggy and full of unfocused anxiety. My heart rate was a giveaway that my nervous system was still running hot, and my brain was doing what brains do when that happens — trying to grab something to attach the anxiety to.

Luckily, we’re on spring break this week, so it couldn’t turn into full-blown Sunday Scaries. But the anxiety was still there, floating around looking for a target. Knowing myself, I knew I had to dump it before it found one.

IYKYK — you wake up in a mood, and the next thing you know, you’re leaving the breakfast table because someone is chewing too loudly. Just to pick a completely random example that has certainly never happened to me.

Breaking It Down a Little

This dream happened the night between March 7th and 8th — the night we turn the clocks ahead an hour — “The sucky time change.”

We lose an hour of sleep and wake up tired whether we want to or not.

The day before had been great. It was my wife’s birthday. We visited our son, toured a distillery (and sampled their bourbon), and ate probably a bit too much.

I developed a vasoreactive headache somewhere along the way — possibly the bourbon, possibly the burnt Basque cheesecake — and by the time it finally passed, I was exhausted and felt like I wanted to carry my head around in a cotton-lined box so it wouldn’t have to move, see anything, or hear anything.

So by the end of the day there had been:

• Emotion.

• Travel.

• Alcohol.

• Heavy food.

• Fatigue.

• Two hours of algorithm-driven social media.

Taken together, nothing about the dream or the morning anxiety should have been surprising. And once I thought about it Sunday morning, it wasn’t.

I wrote about it in my journal, which helped a little. Then I went for a run, which helped a lot, flushing most of it out of my brain, and replacing it with my brain sending messages like: “Dude. Why did you do that to us and our legs?”

Later in the day, I talked to my wife — a former teacher — which was the final processing step I needed. After that, the anxiety was gone.

But it had been real. It starved to death because I refused to feed it what it wanted.

This isn’t a post about my bad decisions and my weird-ass dream.

Let’s Talk About Teen Anxiety

Given what I’ve written about phones before, this is where my mind went.

Everything that happened to me Saturday night — someone who rarely uses social media, who understands exactly how the algorithm works — happened in the span of about two hours. I could literally watch the algorithm shifting while I scrolled. The longer I stayed on certain things, the more they fed me.

More conflict, more comparison, more emotional hooks. I didn’t see a single post from a friend the entire time.

For two hours.

And I couldn’t stop. I knew what it was doing, I knew why it was doing it, and I kept scrolling anyway. I felt gross while I was doing it.

Then the realization hit:

I had spent the evening living like a teenager.

I had spent the evening (just the evening, not a day) letting a machine deliberately push my nervous system around.

And this is what it did to me, someone who knows how this works, someone who rarely engages with it, someone who can usually spot the manipulation in real time.

Everything I described above — exhaustion, emotional loading, lousy sleep, endless scrolling, algorithmically optimized content designed to provoke engagement — that’s just daily life for a teenager with a phone.

What chance do our kids have?

Our kids are reporting record levels of anxiety (the CDC has been reporting about this for many years now), and all you have to do is spend one day inside a school to see it. It shows up everywhere: checking out, avoidance, missing school, physical symptoms, and stress reactions that used to belong to the Don Drapers of the world — not kids.

The pipeline looks something like this:

Plant the seeds of anxiety throughout the day via social media:

• this is how you should look

• this is what you should own

• this is the life you should be living

• this is how other people your age are succeeding

• this is what you need to buy, take, apply, or inject to improve yourself

• this is how kids in China prepare for exams

And layered on top of that:

• bullying

• trash-talk

• social ranking

• anonymous cruelty

all turned up to 15 because it’s happening online, constantly, and often in front of an audience.

Then feed the body like a teenager, based on the four teenage food groups:

• caffeine

• sugar

• carbs

• more caffeine

Then destroy sleep.

• Drink a 300-mg caffeine Monster at 4:00 p.m., and half of it is still in your system at 10:00 (a shot of espresso is about 64 mg).

• Stay up late finishing schoolwork.

• Stay up later talking to friends.

• Stay up even later scrolling.

• Screens until sleep.

That’s the teenager version of what I did.

Now, wake up the next morning with anxiety and a higher heart rate. That’s physiological arousal of the sympathetic nervous system. Your body knows something is wrong, but your brain doesn’t know why. Your brain’s response is to start auditioning explanations:

• Maybe it’s that assignment.

• Maybe it’s that conversation (with a parent/friend/teacher) from yesterday.

• Maybe it’s the death in the family from last year

• Maybe that teacher thinks you’re stupid.

• Maybe that upcoming game.

The body rings the alarm bell, the brain writes the story explaining why the bell is ringing.

The story feels true because the alarm is real. And if the brain “feels” that something is true, it is true.

Those stories? Very hard to disbelieve. Ever try to argue with your own brain when it decides something is wrong? Yeah. Mine doesn’t listen to me very often either.

For me, this lasted about a morning. I reflected, wrote, ran, talked to someone I trust, and processed it out of my system. I got out.

What about our kids? How many nights like that does it take before it becomes the default state? Wake up with anxiety, feel your heart racing, brain searches for a cause. Find one.

Repeat.

Day after day after day.

Eventually, anxiousness stops being an episode; it becomes the default.

And that can grow into real anxiety, then panic and all of anxiety’s other lousy friends.

What I’m Not Saying, What I Am Saying

I’m not saying this explains every case of anxiety.

I’m not saying phones are the only cause.

I’m certainly not saying I have a cure.

Anxiety is complicated, and can grow into an all-encompassing thing when it gets comfortable.

What I am saying is simpler: I had a day where my environment nudged my nervous system into a bad place. I could recognize it, reflect on it. And take steps to correct it.

Our kids are living inside those conditions every single day. We are building daily conditions of physiological dysregulation and then acting surprised when children become emotionally unstable.

And when their behavior reflects that stress, we often treat it as a character flaw instead of an environmental signal. If that short exposure was enough to tilt my brain off balance for a morning, then maybe we should think harder about what it means to grow up inside it. Not once in a while, but constantly.

Kids are kids. Like any living thing, they respond to the environment they’re living in. We can get angry, we can act surprised, but that’s how life works. Organisms respond to their environment.

We owe them a better one.

If you're a teacher or parent seeing this too, I’d be curious what you're noticing.