“Capture attention.” “Hook them in three seconds.” “Stop the scroll.” These phrases are so normal in marketing that they’ve become invisible—like the air around the work. But in mental health and wellness spaces, they carry a quiet contradiction. Because healing, more often than not, involves restoring the very capacities that the attention economy erodes: patience, nuance, self-contact, and choice. A nervous system that is constantly being seized, startled, and pulled outward doesn’t easily return inward. So when we import attention tactics without discernment, we can end up using the language of care to reproduce the dynamics of coercion: urgency, intensity, compression, and false certainty.
The attention economy rewards a certain kind of message design. It likes statements that are fast to process and hard to ignore: absolutes, identity claims, fear cues, moral clarity, and dramatic framing. It likes content that produces an immediate internal jolt—recognition, outrage, relief, “that’s me.” None of these are inherently unethical. Emotion is part of being human, and good content should move people. The problem is what happens when intensity becomes the primary route to reach. Especially in mental health content, intensity often comes from collapsing complexity into a clean label (“this is trauma,” “this is narcissism,” “this is your attachment style”), or from implying high stakes (“if you don’t heal this, you’ll repeat it forever”). These messages may travel well, but they can also recruit people through dysregulation—through the nervous system’s threat-detection, not its capacity for integration.
There’s also a subtler consequence: the language of “capturing attention” treats attention as something to take. It positions the audience as a resource to extract from rather than a subject to meet. In therapy, we would call that a mismatch of frame. Healing work emphasises consent, pacing, and agency; attention marketing often emphasises interruption, acceleration, and behavioural manipulation. When those frames collide, the audience feels it—even if they can’t articulate it. They may follow, but they don’t settle. They consume, but don’t trust. Or they become dependent on the account as a regulatory object: returning for hits of clarity, relief, or identity—rather than building their own internal orientation.
An alternative is what I’d call resonance-based communication. It still respects strategy, but it doesn’t confuse strategy with hijack. Resonance-based content is designed to be recognisable rather than addictive. It doesn’t require the audience to be startled in order to be engaged. It uses grounded specificity instead of sensational generalisation. It leaves room for the reader’s autonomy: “If this fits, consider…” rather than “This is what’s happening to you.” It also makes space for time—because some insights are supposed to unfold as a reflection rather than landing as a punchline.
Practically, this can look like small shifts: using invitations instead of imperatives; avoiding fear hooks; preferring “sometimes” over “always”; separating psychoeducation from diagnosis; and making the post itself a regulative experience through pacing, whitespace, and tone. The paradox is that this approach often creates stronger business outcomes over time. It may not spike as quickly, but it builds an audience who doesn’t just click—they return. They save. They share with discernment. They trust. And in mental health work, trust is not a “nice-to-have.” It is the medium of the message.
I help mental health and wellness brands build content strategies that work with attention without exploiting it—so your marketing remains congruent with the kind of nervous system outcomes you actually care about.
Diana Marin Digital 