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
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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