I feel like this is a dumb question, but I’m really struggling with my phone addiction and I want to know why this happens. I’m also generally curious about the brain and how it works, especially in addiction cases. Is our brain evolution just not caught up with the new technology?
I’m already aware that our brains release dopamine when we use our phones, but why?
Yesterday I read that our brains release dopamine when we fulfill a survival need- the article used eating and sex as examples. Obviously we’ll die without eating, and our species will die without sex (reproduction), so it makes sense for our brains to reward us for these things.
But scrolling on a smartphone isn’t a survival need. It’s fun, but we won’t die without it. So why does my brain release dopamine when I use my phone, so much that I’ve become addicted to it (specifically scrolling)?
In: Biology
Dopamine is supposed to reward you for “good survival behavior”.
But when our brain developed there were no phones, so we basically misinterpret phone usage as good for us for various reasons.
First of all it’s colourful and flashy. When something is colourful in nature it’s usually a good idea to pay attention to it. It might be a tasty fruit, or a poisonous insect. Whatever it is you should investigate and not ignore.
Then it’s communicative. You’re talking to other humans (even if indirectly) and we’re a social species where interacting positively with other humans is necessary for survival.
Another aspect is that some types of social media are specifically designed to get emotional responses from you. They have an algorithm that tracks your interests and then presents you more of those things that you paid attention to. Your phone basically learns what your brain reacts to and gives you more of it.
Social interaction became a survival need when we started to live in large groups, and the desire for novelty became a survival need when we started to rely on making complex tools to get food.
Social media provides both so our brains love it.
Even per recent daily reddit article, watching porn is better than making money or playing video games. Dopamine is so imperative.
Dopamine is known as being a happiness hormone, but other than the brain it also plays a part in the immune system, kidneys and digestion. https://youtu.be/LRGfGoRXqQY
Socialization is a survival need, and the phone can meet this in a lot of different ways (e.g. worried that your tribemates don’t like you and will ostracize you, keeping watch together for dangers on the horizon, finding a mate to produce offspring with).
Also the designers of the various apps try to make them as engaging as possible, utilizing other subconscious tricks (e.g. bright colors might signify blood or berries, so perhaps we are hardwired to notice them more easily).
If you want a tip to reduce engagement with your phone, my wife has found success making everything grayscale (there’s probably some app for that). She finds it easier to disengage without color.
>So why does my brain release dopamine when I use my phone
Dopamine is a reward for searching or achieving new – so, doom scrolling, endless tik-tok playlists, game levels, etc.
I have a PhD in neuroscience and study reward and addiction, including the role of neurons in the mesolimbic dopamine pathway in drug and social reward.
The stuff you have read about dopamine is mostly horseshit. Dopamine is not a reward/pleasure signal, and it is not primarily released at moments of satisfaction. Setting aside the fact that there are many dopaminergic pathways that have nothing to do with reward, AND the fact that the specific dopamine pathway people are *thinking of* when they say dopamine=reward involves many other types of neurons besides dopamine releasing neurons, even that specific subset of dopamine neurons is not specifically associated with reward. It’s more like “focused attention on something, good OR bad.”
The main reason all these pop-sci explanations for what dopamine does etc. are so commonly repeated and believed is that they are more palatable than the truth, which is that brains are terrifyingly complex and we don’t understand reward / motivation very well at all. Explanations like “dopamine = reward/satisfaction” are satisfyingly easy to understand, which makes people intuitively prefer those explanations.
If you have noticed that the stuff you have been reading about dopamine is kind of confusing and has large gaps that leave you thinking “wait, but how does THAT part happen?”, this is why. It’s not a defect in your ability to understand the explanations, it’s that the explanations are bogus.
Compare to another complex topic: how computers work. It’s a complex topic with many layers to it, but if you Google / ask reddit about any particular layer (how do transistors work, logic gates, how logic gates can add numbers, binary numbers, etc.) you can get a detailed explanation. And, the explanations you get from different sources will largely agree with each other on the specific details. In contrast when you Google stuff about dopamine, you’ll get a lot of conflicting information that doesn’t really fit together, and if you then try to get more information about other layers of the problem (e.g. but how does the brain KNOW when to release dopamine / how does dopamine supposedly produce good feelings?) you’ll either get no answer or very vague and low-detail answers.
It’s actually a misconception that dopamine is a “reward”. It partly acts like that too, but mainly is what drives your decisions. Feeling driven, motivated, or urging is you feeling your dopamine. Anticipation, capturing your attention is also dopamine. It’s not something you get afterwards and look forward to, the looking forward is IT.
That’s why gambling is so addictive, anticipation of reward in gambling stimulates your brain to release a lot of dopamine, forcing/urging you to keep going.
Scrolling on your phone is the same. You are constantly anticipating something interesting to pop up. That makes you release dopamine and keep you scrolling.
Without dopamine you would have trouble making any decisions whatsoever. Nothing would feel right. You could be lying in bed and contemplating getting up, but you wouldn’t be able to, or with severe difficulty, decide to get up because it would just feel wrong.
I think it’s limiting to think of the brain only releasing dopamine for “survival needs.” Humans get dopamine for all kinds of things that are only very abstractly related to survival. Listening to music releases dopamine but, while the fact that we enjoy music is probably a result of our mind’s desire to find and notice patterns (which is a survival strategy), saying music is a “survival need” is misleading. Especially since we all like different kinds of music, so there’s clearly more to it than that.
In the same way, everything that social media ‘does’ most likely has a survival need down inside it somewhere, but we’re such complicated creatures that defining it in that way probably isn’t helpful.
Dopamine (and also a bunch of other chemicals in your brain, but we can say ‘dopamine’ for simplicity) isn’t so much the ‘reward’ chemical as it is the ‘intention’ chemical. People think that what happens is you eat some fried chicken and then your brain releases dopamine. But it’s more like the dopamine release is the way your brain gets you think about, choose, and go get the fried chicken in the first place. It’s not just the reward for winning the race, it’s also the racetrackand the car.
If you picture a perfectly flat field representing all the things you can do in the whole world. And your attention (or, more accurately, intention) as a ball rolling around on that field, dopamine is like a groove that gets carved in the dirt over time. So that, as your attention rolls back and forth, it will naturally roll down into the closest, biggest groove and stay down there unless you exert effort to push it back up. The more dopagenic (“releases lots of dopamine”) the activity, the deeper, wider, and steeper the groove, the faster and easier the ball falls down, and the harder to is to push it back out again.
So, when you sit down to check your email ‘just for one second’ and blink and you’re doomscrolling Reddit 30 minutes later, that’s why. The little ball of your intention, which you were rolling toward “do my homework”, instead got caught in the deepest, steepest, closest (right there in your pocket!) groove it could find and, unless you were exerting consistent effort to keep it out, it just rolled down in there and stayed.
Neurotypical brains are able to regulate dopamine well enough that an NT person can make a decision about what to do, and go do it. Their grooves are shallow enough, or organized enough that they can roll the little ball toward the groove they want and, if they miss, easily push the ball out of the wrong one.
An atypical brain (one with ADHD, for example), can’t regulate dopamine as well. So their grooves are all over the place, criss-crossing each other, randomly deep or shallow, and instead of flat ground they have all these mounds where they have to push the ball up to the top of it and balance it there precariously if they want to get things done. And if they let go of the ball even for a second, it’s all the way down the Minecraft Groove before they even realize what happened.
And as for your phone, it’s important to recognize that everything on your phone has been designed, planned, engineered, and built to make it as rewarding as possible to pick up and use. The sheer scale of the resources that have been expended to increase your dependence on that device is mind-boggling. Thousands upon thousands of the world’s smartest people have spent their lives doing little else but monitoring immense amounts of data about what you look at and why, and making changes to the device to make you look at it more.
You’re trying to push your ball into the tiny little divot called “Read a Book” that you scraped in the dirt with your bare hands, but right next to you is a giant chasm built by the greatest landscape architects who have ever lived.
The bad news is that this is all inescapable. The modern world has been created and shaped by enormously powerful companies and people who profit from destroying your ability to make good decisions.
The good news is that you can do a lot to reduce or even reverse most of this. It just takes some time, effort, and a lot of planning to make changes to your routines so the “bad grooves” aren’t close to, or in the way of, the “good grooves.”
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