We live in a time where we are all invited to become addicted to something. These addictive behaviours release a very larger amount of dopamine and it can lower the baseline level of dopamine which may cause detrimental physiologic changes in our brain.
Sometimes people become addicted because they think their life isn’t interesting so they frequently expose themselves to high pleasurable behavior. In our brain Pleasure and pain are co-located and work like a balance, tipping inversely. So after you do something pleasurable your brain immediately compensates by downregulating dopamine. So actually what happens is Pleasure gets reduced by pain. Example : if you are using Social media mindlessly and releasing too much dopamine as it’s related to the reward system of our brain, you will have a crash right after when you close the application. You will have a dopamine deficit. And this where you have to wait, just wait. You will feel boredom or anxiety which we were referring as pain earlier. But if you don't wait you will have another dopamine deficit which will lower the baseline of dopamine. And after that you will repeat the behaviour not to seek pleasure but to escape the pain of missing the pleasure.
The easiness of our life (lack of survival essentiality and physical envolvement) has made our life boring. People tends to find more purposeful work or work which they are more passionate about. But it's a burden and hardly they can find it in this way. So stop looking for passion and do the immediate things. Things that needs to be done, not the things that you want to do. We often just look for the perfect thing to do which may be a part of escapism, but instead doing the immediate thing is the key of super performance.
30 days is the average time that takes to reset the dopamine system and break an addictive pattern. First 10 days gonna be miserable. One would feel anxiety, impulsive, physical agitation, trouble sleeping, angry etc. From 3rd week you may start feeling better.
Telling the truth in every aspect of life is the central of the recovery. Disclosing yourself can create intimate connections which stimulate dopamine release. It also strengthens circuits in the pre-frontal cortex and enhances connections to the limbic brain and reward brain.
People with severe addiction suffer from a lack of homeostasis in the pleasure-pain balance. So for them the relapse can occur anytime - maybe when they are doing great and one day they just get back to it subconsciously, or maybe it’s after 7 days or it could be after 7 years. For them its like having an itch and being told you can’t scratch it – it’s always there and maybe you’ll scratch it in your sleep because an unconscious opportunity. No matter how far you drive, you are always the same distance from the ditch.
Thinking about the triggers associated with the behaviour or thinking about the behaviour can already release anticipatory dopamine. And dopamine basically triggers the work.
“Social media is it really is a drug. And it’s engineered to be a drug.” – Dr. Anna Lembke.
And The addictive process is the same as other addictive behaviours like usimg drugs, gambling or porn etc. So use social media with intention and with planning so you don’t get sucked in and try to detoxicating social media at least for a day after a certain period of days. The collective mission should be to make sure we’re preserving offline ways to connect.
