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The Psychology of your 20s

378. Your guide to surviving the dating apps in your 20s

26 Jan 2026

Transcription

Chapter 1: How are dating apps designed to keep you engaged?

0.031 - 6.172 Unknown

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. What if mind control is real?

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6.372 - 9.282 Nav Green

If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?

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Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?

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12.87 - 16.954 Nav Green

When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.

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Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?

19.577 - 22.901 Nav Green

I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.

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Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, aka neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

44.547 - 58.694 Nav Green

This show contains information subject to, but not limited to, personal takes, rumors, not-so-accurate stats, and plenty more. What's up, man? This your boy, Nal Green, from the Broken Play Podcast. Look, it's the end of the season. The playoffs are here. But guess what? It ain't the end of your season.

58.854 - 76.082 Nav Green

You can always tune in with Broken Play Podcast with Nal Green on the Black Effect Podcast Network. Not a team who ain't going to the playoffs. The Chiefs. It's time to rebuild. Listen to Broken Play with Nav Green from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Chapter 2: What rules should you follow to maintain your self-esteem while dating?

505.398 - 533.819 Gemma Spake

Let's see how we're going to survive this kind of new dating system that we all operate in. Stay with us. Let's not waste any time here. Let's get right into tip number one. If you want to be better at surviving, managing the dating apps, you need to number one, understand the psychology behind why and how dating apps work and specifically how they make money.

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534.48 - 557.601 Gemma Spake

This will transform your relationship to the platform. And by changing your relationship to the platform, this will change the relationships that you have on them. I said it before, I think dating apps aren't designed to be effective. They're designed to be addictive. They deliberately give this impression that the perfect relationship can be discovered.

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557.581 - 585.941 Gemma Spake

rather than made and built and they do this by providing us with all these matches and all this arbitrary information essentially convincing you that like your job right now is to pick you've just got to pick and you've got to make sure it's the best one They're manufactured to sell you this narrative that you're kind of always one swipe away from someone better than the person before.

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587.143 - 604.051 Gemma Spake

You're always one swipe away from the one. And that keeps you picking up the phone again and again because love is like such a delicious promise. All of us want it. And it means that we carry on the search despite sometimes matching with people that are like really nice. and people that we really click with.

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604.472 - 627.678 Gemma Spake

But the possibility of more that is offered by this like endless kind of vacuum of people means that we don't always prioritize those people. Means that actually the level of choice ends up being suffocating. Actually, there is this really interesting 2012 article from the researcher Eli Finkel and also their colleagues.

627.778 - 650.23 Gemma Spake

And they look at how online dating, because of how many choices they offer, actually reduces three-dimensional people, four-dimensional, five-dimensional people. It reduces our robust personhood into a two-dimensional display of information or a two-dimensional character. This actually reduces how good we are at choosing who we'd click with.

650.872 - 672.591 Gemma Spake

Dating apps promote this assessment-oriented mindset where we kind of fall into the role of assessor and maybe unintentionally objectify potential partners. And if we start viewing someone as an object rather than as a real living, breathing, feeling human, that is the danger.

672.631 - 694.592 Gemma Spake

It actually reduces the likelihood that we want to commit to even getting to know that person because to us, we're seeing so many people constantly, they just lose all dimension. In studies, researchers have found that people often They reject those on dating apps that in person they would psychologically be most compatible with.

694.732 - 718.46 Gemma Spake

And they do that for really, really small things like they had too many pictures with their friends. I didn't like his shirt. She had two selfies instead of one. And we do this and we've all done this. We do this because we have so many choices on dating apps. We have to come up with these like silly, arbitrary, shallow little rules just so that we can process such a vast amount of information.

Chapter 3: Why is creating a clear and honest profile important?

1122.632 - 1137.946 Gemma Spake

Especially if you're looking for a long-term relationship and you're ending up in all these small relationships, it just shows that you're being overwhelmed such that you are not in touch with your true desire anymore. Design your interactions with the app to best suit your desired outcome.

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1138.027 - 1156.226 Gemma Spake

If you want a relationship, if you want something casual, if you're not sure, how you approach it is going to determine what you get from this situation. When we get a bit fed up and fatigued with swiping or liking or getting nowhere, we definitely develop this scarcity mindset that pushes us into making pretty poor decisions. This has happened to me.

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1156.347 - 1179.694 Gemma Spake

I remember like the dating apps were so exhausting back in the day like that I decided to lower my standards and accept lesser treatment or accept people in that like I had no future with. And that's not and that wasn't conducive to like the kind of relationship goals that I have. Dating apps are uniquely brilliant at creating what I'd call emotional loose threads.

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1180.234 - 1206.743 Gemma Spake

This is like half conversations, maybe plans, ghost chats, people who pop back up every three weeks like a freaking haunted Victorian child. And those loose threads add to a big cognitive load. Like there is this vague stress following us around everywhere. Because we've like poured a little bit of energy into all these people and we can't keep track of them. Where is that energy going?

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1207.183 - 1226.88 Gemma Spake

Like we cannot sustain that forever. Each one of those almost maybe little things is taxing. So when you put your rules in place, you protect that energy from, I don't know, from the clutter. I think we all need better dating app hygiene. Like do not...

1226.86 - 1254.673 Gemma Spake

leave your matches unattended or unanswered like dirty dishes or leftover food if you're not going to touch it in the next 12 to 24 hours you're not going to want it in two days or two months unmatch give them their time back give yourself your time back like clean up after yourself these are the specific rules i know i've kind of talked about this very abstractly the specific rules that i think you should instigate take it or leave it rule number one

1256.206 - 1278.85 Gemma Spake

When you match with somebody, either of you have 24 hours to message, otherwise you unmatch. Simple. This shows, like, if somebody's interested, if you're interested enough, you will reach out. You will make contact. If not, no hard feelings. Like, this is the... You know that scene in, like, The Blind Side where it's like, if you don't like it in the store, you're not going to like it at home?

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Same with the dating apps. If you don't like them...

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at the first impression you're not going to change your mind in two days and if you do change your mind it's going to be because you're bored and that's not fair for anybody 24 hours unmatch another rule similar to that one if they have stopped replying literally hit them up with like a hey where did you go kind of message in like a kind funny way if they don't respond to that message unmatch 12 hours 24 hours especially if you've been messaging pretty consistently up until that point

Chapter 4: How can you ensure dating apps don't replace real-life interactions?

1680.942 - 1689.095 Nav Green

It's time to rebuild. Who your MVP right now then? Drake May up there. Josh Allen up there still. Oh, my boy, Matthew Stafford.

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Where did he vote Knicks at?

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1691.759 - 1692.72 Nav Green

He ain't too far behind.

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He did all this talking.

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1693.862 - 1728.707 Nav Green

What Matthew Stafford is doing statistically, bro, is crazy. Bro, you know I ain't no Josh Allen fan, but Matthew Stafford got me. In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze. Her husband, Mike, was on his laptop. What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever.

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I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing. And immediately, the mask came off. You're supposed to be safe. That's your home. That's your husband. To keep this secret for so many years, he's like a seasoned pro. This is a story about the end of a marriage, but it's also the story of one woman who was done living in the dark.

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You're a dangerous person who preys on vulnerable and trusting people. Your creditor might go up in good.

1767.184 - 1774.913 Nav Green

Listen to Betrayal Season 5 starting on January 29th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1776.04 - 1802.942 Gemma Spake

Okay, we are back. Tip number three, talking about dating app guidelines. I'm always of the belief that you should make the first move. I don't care about rules. I don't care about what roles men or women or people should play or dynamics or whatever it is. I just think rule number six, less coy, more forwardness. There's this really annoying thing that we see a lot in modern dating. There's

Chapter 5: What mindset should you adopt to avoid taking rejection personally?

2190.423 - 2210.868 Gemma Spake

These photos all look the same. And they genuinely were like the exact same photo, just in a different font. And I hadn't even realized. This is called, in psychology, unconscious impression management. And it's the ways we try to control how we're perceived without even realizing it, mainly due to our own self-objectification and our own self-monitoring.

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2211.649 - 2233.361 Gemma Spake

It's like the same principle behind why people body check or people always gravitate towards certain colors or types of clothes or they don't smile with all their teeth displayed, weird things like that. We all do them, by the way, we all do them. Dating apps, this is like one of the only times in life where we really get to choose how we're going to be perceived.

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That sounds like great news, but also at times it can mean projecting someone

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we're not and actually projecting a version of us that is worse than who we actually are because we're trying to hide insecurities that other people don't even notice other people love about us so get your friends to choose your dating app photos get them to arrange them even just give them like a selection of like 30 or 40 and you just see the difference it's it's insane

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2265.955 - 2281.483 Gemma Spake

Okay, tip number five, probably my favorite tip of them all, don't stop meeting people in real life. Dating apps work as a tool for meeting people. They shouldn't be your only solution for romantic interaction.

2281.463 - 2298.983 Gemma Spake

I've noticed online a lot of discourse around how people are now leaving the dating apps in like droves for in-person meetups, for speed dating nights, for dating trivia nights, simply because it's absolutely exhausting to do all that work and never actually meet people.

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In the UK specifically, in the UK specifically, there was an online report that documented how there have been major declines in the usage of dating apps like Tinder, Hinge and Bumble compared to the previous year.

2313.881 - 2328.379 Gemma Spake

There was also a 2025 study done by researchers in Germany who basically interviewed all these people and found really high signs of dating app fatigue with a lot of participants feeling like they were really worn down by dating

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repetitive interactions by unclear intentions by how emotional it was to just have all these like these tiny mini connections with people that went nowhere I honestly think a lot of people are mainly sick of like the transactional nature of it all it's like all trends or all cultural phenomena there's always a counterculture after a while after things have kind of settled or been the norm for a bit

Chapter 6: How can you prevent dating app burnout?

2713.55 - 2738.691 Nav Green

He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, this is Dr. Jesse Mills, director of the Men's Clinic at UCLA Health and host of the Mailroom podcast. Each January, guys everywhere make the same resolutions.

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2738.991 - 2754.912 Nav Green

Get stronger, work harder, fix what's broken. But what if the real work isn't physical at all? To kick off the new year, I sat down with Dr. Steve Poulter, a psychologist with over 30 years experience helping men unpack shame, anxiety, and emotional pain they were never taught to name.

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2754.892 - 2775.246 Nav Green

In a powerful two-part conversation, we discuss why men aren't emotionally bulletproof, why shame hides in plain sight, and how real strength comes from listening to yourself and to others. Guys who are toxic, they're immature, or they've got something they just haven't resolved. Once that gets resolved, then there comes empathy and compassion.

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2775.226 - 2796.884 Nav Green

If you want this to be the year you stop powering through pain and start understanding what's underneath, listen to The Mailroom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. This show contains information subject to, but not limited to, personal takes, rumors, not-so-accurate stats, and plenty more. What's up, man?

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2796.904 - 2818.647 Nav Green

This your boy, Nav Green, from the Broken Play Podcast. Look, it's the end of the season. The playoffs are here. But guess what? It ain't the end of your season. You can always tune in with Broken Play Podcast with Nav Green on the Black Effect Podcast Network. Not a team who ain't going to the playoffs. They're Chiefs. It's time to rebuild. Who your MVP right now then? Drake May up there.

2819.028 - 2823.554 Nav Green

Josh Allen up there still. Oh, my boy, Matthew Stafford.

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Where did he vote Knicks at?

2825.437 - 2826.399 Nav Green

He ain't too far behind.

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We did all this talking.

Chapter 7: What tips can help you meet people in real life?

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I think there is and I know there is a pressure to be like dating at 100% if you say you're dating and showing up day after day on the apps out of fear that you're going to miss the love of your life and never have an opportunity to match with them again. Do you know how many times I match with the same people multiple times like because I deleted and came back?

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3181.897 - 3204.856 Gemma Spake

You don't have to become permanently disenfranchised with dating because you keep thinking you need to push through the burnout that the apps bring. You want to be able to have a healthy relationship with this. I think deleting when you feel like you and the apps aren't clicking, taking two to three months off reduces the pessimism that you can have around all dating.

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3205.357 - 3226.503 Gemma Spake

But additionally, I think it will also reduce the chances of you settling for less just so that you can stop dating, just so that you can feel less frustrated. And it also stops you from getting too emotionally invested in people who don't respond or who don't get back to you because the sense of urgency is less intense.

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3227.605 - 3236.035 Gemma Spake

I will say, when I met my partner Tom on Hinge, I had done a six-month dating app detox.

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3236.015 - 3259.474 Gemma Spake

and i'm not saying this is going to happen to you but i re-downloaded the app and he was the first person i matched with and that's the thing when you are feeling more high energy you can come back and actually start having fun with it again like i felt like there was nothing left for me and then it was like oh this great person had rejoined whilst i was gone then you can really organize loads of dates you get to talk to people you're actually interested in

3259.454 - 3283.066 Gemma Spake

You just get to like enjoy it. One of my favorite creators called Rach, I think her name's like Rach Rat or something. It's, I think it's Rach Rat, but she posts her dating diaries on TikTok. And something she says is that the early stages of dating is only meant to be two things, sexy and fun. Sexy and fun. And if they're not, what is the point?

3284.088 - 3300.994 Gemma Spake

So if you feel like your options are dwindling, come back two, three, four months, six months. Also, the reserves are going to be refreshed. It's going to be a whole new set of people. People break up all the time. People suddenly heal from breakups and come back on the apps all the time, back on the market.

3301.034 - 3326.312 Gemma Spake

The last thing dating apps should make you feel is like your options are limited or scarce because that is what they want you to feel and they want to trap you into spending money and maybe even settling. So remember, fun and sexy is your objective. Dating burnout is so real and it's not sexy and it's not fun. So take a step back until you feel like you want to give it another try.

3326.352 - 3355.412 Gemma Spake

There is no rush. I know, especially as we kind of get into like our late 20s and 30s and even older, like there's such an urgency to find somebody before opportunities and options and doors close. This is going to maybe be advice you don't want to hear, but I think urgency and panic is the worst thing you can do because it's always going to mean that you make a poorer decision.

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