Contemporary discourse around digital well-being tends to focus on self-control when it comes to “addicting” social media apps and digital devices. By acting on behalf of users, designers and engineers promote various self-regulating products and services in order for users to “fix” the distractible brains of typical users. This paper explores the role of the history of psychology on user-experience thinking and engineering and provides a critical genealogy of digital well-being discourse and persuasive technology. In particular, I expand on the role of dual-process models in human–computer interaction and health behavior change from the 1980s to today. By exploring the social construction of the distracted, impulsive, “primitive” animal brain (system 1), I find that it is this part of the mind that the engineer wishes to “treat,” via app design. In order to tame this “primitive” brain, researchers and engineers have turned to behavioral science, hoping to better structure user options and encourage users to manage their own time and normalize screen habits. I argue that normality discourses like this are founded upon ideas of time management and delay of gratification, whereas abnormality is tied to ideas of immediate gratification and time wasting. This dichotomy is not simply to enforce social norms around time wasting, but reinforces social and econoimc inequities. Therefore, unlike some other approaches to digital well-being, I urge future scholarship on the subject to examine the taken-for-granted social-cultural context, which will lead not only to a more politically nuanced understanding of the subject but may also lead to further discussions over how digital well-being could be conceived otherwise.

当谈到“令人上瘾”的社交媒体应用程序和数字设备时，关于数字幸福的当代讨论往往侧重于自我控制。通过代表用户，设计师和工程师推广各种自我调节的产品和服务，以便用户“修复”典型用户分心的大脑。本文探讨了心理学史在用户体验思维和工程中的作用，并提供了数字幸福话语和说服技术的关键谱系。特别是，我扩展了双过程模型在 1980 年代至今的人机交互和健康行为变化中的作用。通过探索分心、冲动、“原始”动物大脑（系统 1）的社会建构，我发现工程师希望通过应用程序设计“治疗”的正是这部分大脑。为了驯服这种“原始”大脑，研究人员和工程师转向行为科学，希望能够更好地构建用户选项，并鼓励用户管理自己的时间并使屏幕习惯正常化。我认为，像这样的正常话语建立在时间管理和延迟满足的思想之上，而异常则与立即满足和浪费时间的思想联系在一起。这种二分法不仅仅是为了围绕浪费时间来强制执行社会规范，而是强化了社会和经济的不平等。因此，与其他一些解决数字福祉的方法不同，我敦促未来关于该主题的学术研究检查理所当然的社会文化背景，