« Our smartphones are making us dopamine junkies » Anne Lembke, chief of Stanford University’s dual diagnosis addiction clinic.
As it is often known, social media has a sort of power over our emotions. If we see a funny video, we laugh; if we see a sad one, we feel sad, if we see a happy one, we feel happy and so on. We feel all these emotions within a few seconds as one video immediately leads to another.
To explain these feelings, one word keeps coming back as a reason for a lot of our behavior: dopamine.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that sends messages between nerve cells. It helps regulate movement, emotion, pleasure and reward. When we accomplish something or feel happy, that’s our brain releasing dopamine, which makes us feel good and motivated to keep going. It also plays a role in a « fight or flight » situation, when we are in a dangerous situation, to prepare our body for action.
Social media nowadays plays a big part in the release of dopamine: Dopamine being a reward system for the body, social media is one of the sources that provides this feeling.
The mechanism:
When we post content on social media for example, we expect our friends or other people to like it, and that’s when the dopamine kicks in. It intervenes before the actual reward, so before the like, to prepare us for the incoming satisfaction.
This mechanism also applies to infinite scrolling (the action of continuously moving through content on a platform by swiping up and down on a screen). It develops a variable reward system to keep the user longer on the platform, and that can, for some people, develop a kind of addiction. The variable reward means that while scrolling on a platform, different videos will show up, some being more interesting than others. It is exactly this variation of content that keeps the user going, always looking and hoping for better content.
It is more about the emotions we feel while watching the videos that develop the habit of scrolling than the scrolling itself.
Thus, we can compare the social media to casino slots with this feeling of hoping and wanting to land on the big prize but without knowing when and how much this price is going to be.
So, there is some excitement in scrolling on the platform, especially when we finally get good and funny content, but as soon as we stop scrolling, this dopamine level, that just made us feel so good, drops, making us feel even worse than before and the next hit won’t be as rewarding. Some might feel more irritated afterwards, others won’t be able to concentrate as well as before or will even develop insomnia. Therefore, the higher the dopamine release, the more addictive the action gets.
The more we use social media, the less the control system acts against the dopamine stimulated by the applications, so the less we can control our “need” to scroll.
This need to get as many likes as possible, or even the fact that we are tied to our phones and spend every spare minute on social media, can be directly linked to us wanting any sort of social connection. From our younger age we all have an interest in any kind of social relationship, whether as a child when we need another being to feed us, or even as an adult when we require someone’s help.
Therefore, social media is a mechanism that brings us into social interaction, a state that we, at the end of the day, are all seeking for.
Ultimately, the more we are on social media, the more we develop a feeling of constant need for stimulation, which can cause stress, anxiety or the feeling of losing the ability to connect with people outside of the virtual world. But there are other ways to satisfy our desires. An alternative could be to read a good book, do sports or take ice water baths. These actions allow our brain to regenerate our dopamine levels. It is, of course, not an instant gratification but can be even more rewarding in the long run.
In addition, it is very important to have a time during the day where we let our thoughts freely navigate instead of constantly seeking stimulation and distraction. It may seem boring and will involve dealing with discomfort, but it is crucial to reconnect with ourselves and others and to have genuine thoughts and experiences.
Liza SAMAHA
M2 Cyberjustice
Sources:
https://www.therapyin.london/blog/constant-stimulation/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4rTBu8kovA&t=79s