Post #827

🤳 Social Media Dopamine Loop — Introduction ❗️Disclaimer: I am not gonna dive deep into the biological origin and purposes of dopamine as a hormone. Writing this post I just wanna emphasize how dangerous it is to follow and crave dopamine without control. What’s the dopamine loop after all? This article sums it up pretty well. In a nutshell, it is a constant seeking of small and fast dopamine portions (or hits) that bring us short-term pleasure. It can be sugary food or drinks, it can be sex, binge-watching Netflix, playing video games, or even simple human interactions. 🤯Fun Fact: some scientists and writers were deliberately limiting their interactions with other people in the first part of the day in order to stay focused and not be distracted by peoples’ faces. Such an extreme approach comes from the fact that humans are extremely susceptible to faces. It takes a lot of our “RAM” to analyze and understand other human beings based on their facial expressions. So in order to perform at the highest, they made such sacrifices. Coming back to dopamine. The main problem with such dopamine hits is that they can be achieved pretty effortlessly, without working hard to attain them (and I am not saying that in order to enjoy something you should “deserve” it only by working hard). ☹️ Let’s have a step back for a while and imagine how it all looked like thousands of years ago. Obviously, we won’t compare the lifestyle of people living then and now. The basic brain functions and frameworks, however, haven’t changed much since then. 🧠 What we need as humans basically are 2 things: calories and bits of information. The first ones feed our body and brain in order to function, and the second ones are crucial for our brain and therefore for our survival. How? Our brain is an extremely energy-consuming organ since it constantly gathers data around us, analyses it, and makes decisions that, at that time, were crucial for our survival. 🏹 From that standpoint, in order to get enough calories, you had to hunt. Hunts can be extremely long and unsuccessful. Once you get it you should start thinking about getting more later. Total pain in the a**, to be honest. Same with bits of information — we are especially receptive to visual clues, movements, and changes in the landscape in order to detect potential predators, food, etc. We are simply wired that way which enabled us to survive till that day. All this brainwork performed by us is exhausting. The same behavioral and neural patterns apply today. What does it mean nowadays? Neither of these 2 resources is scarce now. Food — almost unlimited access. It’s nothing compared to thousands of years ago. Information — all around us. It’s actually overwhelming. No wonder obesity is taking over in developed countries and people are suffering more and more from depression, anxiety, and lack of energy. Like it or not, we (humanity) unconsciously broke the pattern that provided us with a healthy existence. 🍟 Funny enough, we actually can stop eating — that’s good news because otherwise we die or become less attractive mate partners. This mechanism works pretty well (on the other hand, given the amount of free porn and 0 effort to get sexual arousal I am not sure about that). However, when it comes to information therewas no need for evolution to develop a mechanism that would stop us from getting more information. I mean, why would you want that, right? More information means more chances of survival. Noone however expected that information will become available on THAT scale. Which has led, ironically, to disrupting our existence instead of improving it (apart from the overall civilizational progress, I mean). 📱So now, why can’t I stop scrolling on my app feeds? This question is connected to another one: why am I constantly in a bad mood, having depression or anxiety? I am gonna cover some tips in the next post since it’s gotten pretty big already. Let’s collect 20 “🔥”, so I will see if you liked the post. To be continued 🔜 #TooDeep #OffTopic