How Dopamine Is Ruining The Modern World
A daily battle. Just keep fighting. Just hold on. Slowly, the battles will get easier.
Recently, I began a study on the problem of dopamine abuse in the modern world, where every resource is at our fingertips. Did you know your constant seek of pleasure is causing you a great deal of pain without you even noticing?
Don’t worry, I’ll explain everything.
Although dopamine is one of the causes for addictive behaviors, it is necessary for our survival.
Its evidence in involvement in reward-driven learning comes from studies of genetically altered mice that cannot synthesize dopamine in the brain. They lack food-seeking behavior and end up dying. But they also fail to engage in addictive behaviors.
Rewards are habit-forming because it causes dopaminergic burst-firing. This burst-firing develops with age, as the individual learns about the environment.
Dopamine in itself is not addictive, but the need for the dopamine release causes the addiction, therefore, creating addictive behaviors. People will gradually increase the regularity of the behavior in order to maintain this release in their brains. This can lead to the brain requiring more dopamine over time than normal production allows. That’s when the person becomes dependent on the behavior, leading to cravings of never being satisfied with the amount.
Addiction is learned behavior, which means the more you expose yourself to a certain behavior the more you reinforce the learning behavior. The trigger of the dopamine neurons in the brain boosts the learning of search responses. And motivational arousal increases during the need states in which the responsiveness of the individual will be determined. When engaging, then, in addictive behavior, the subset of muscles that involve the behavior is activated, while the set that would interfere is inhibited.
Our primal instincts have kept us seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. But in today’s world, such basic needs are readily available, which changes everything.
People say that the addictive behaviors this change caused are fueled by depression, anxiety and insomnia. But the opposite is actually true: addictions can become the cause of pain, not the relief. Because the triggers for the behaviors floods the brain with pleasure, but once it wears off, the individual feels worse. Over time, the addictive behavior is less effective, but the individual is unable to stop, because when the individual is not doing it, the individual is in a state of dopamine deficit.
The areas of the brain that process pleasure also process pain. Pleasure and pain are always balanced. One of the principles of this balancing is that it wants to remain level, that is called homeostasis. When the balance tilts to the side of pain, it causes cravings, that’s why we feel the need to seek pleasure again, to counter that experience of pain.
Phones are addicting, they have been engineered to be addictive. And many people fail to manage compulsive overconsumption of their digital devices. The world in itself is hyperstimulating, triggering all of these addictions. Social media leverages the same neural circuitry used by slot machines and cocaine to keep us engaged for as long as possible. If you watch yourself when you can’t seem to find your phone, you will see yourself in panic. Most of us have become very entwined with our digital lives. The hyper-social environment social media provides is what attaches us. Our phones have proven immense benefit to society, but it came with a cost. Studies have shown links between phone usage and increased levels of anxiety and depression, poor sleep quality, and increased risk of car injury or death.
Social media relies on revenue from advertisers, they all compete for your attention and time. The victorious are those who exploit better the features of the brain’s reward systems. To keep us locked in, they use variable reward schedules. If we perceive a reward to be delivered at random, and if it’s easy to check the reward, we end up checking habitually. If you pay attention, you might find yourself checking your phone at the slightest feeling of boredom, purely out of habit. For example, Instagram’s algorithm will withhold likes to deliver them in large bursts. Your dopamine centers are manipulated by the initial lack of response from social media to respond robustly to the sudden influx of social appraisal. They take advantage of our dopamine-driven desire for social validation until we become habitual users.
Because of all this, we are less and less happy. We’ve forgotten how to be alone with our thoughts. We are forever interrupting ourselves meaning we rarely concentrate on tasks for long or get into a creative flow.
While drugs make you run out of money, social media is free. As well as compromising our attention spans, our obsession with instant gratification means we are constantly living based on emotion, rather than based on future planning and problem-solving.
When addictive behaviors change the brain’s chemistry, the brain adapts. Once the adaptation becomes normal, the brain will want to correct the imbalance by engaging in the behavior again. Over time, the behavior will change how the brain works. This change is possible because of the brain’s neuroplasticy. But since it can adapt to form unhealthy habits it can also adapt to counter them.
If you want to fight this addiction, you must recognize that detox can take several days to several weeks. Many medical professionals claim that 90 days is needed for dopamine recovery. You can start with a period of fasting. Time away resets your brain and gives you perspective on how dependency affects you. The goal here is not to banish it, but to enjoy it moderately. It’s far easier to go from abstinence to moderation, than from excessive consumption to moderation.
Something that helps us is the dutch practice of niksen, which involves setting aside time each day to do nothing, it’s all about being still with your thoughts.
We are under the impression that we can control when we feel joy. We can’t, and we need to stop hunting for pleasure all the time. It’s too much of a good thing. We can beat our digital dependencies by embracing a more monastic mindset. Replace pleasure-seeking vices with painful pursuits. When we do things that are challenging, instead of receiving a dopamine boost beforehand we experience it afterwards. Doing hard things is one of the best ways to pursue a life worth living, because the pleasure we get afterwards is more enduring. Earned highs are much sweeter.
Mindful use of technology is the best tool you have. It all starts with a phone in a drawer.