In her Wall Street Journal article: Digital Addictions Are Drowning Us in Dopamine, Dr, Lembke, a Stamford University professor and psychiatrist, talks about the scientific biological effects of addictions to our devices. It’s real folks. This is not FIG banging the drum of putting down our phones or any other technological apparatus and talking or connecting with our fellow human beings. No. This is concrete, physiological, measurable, science based fact that continuously interacting with our high-tech electronic leashes, gaming apparatuses and social media actually, physically, alters our brains to crave more of it, thereby de-incentivising us to engage with others on a human level.
Gasp, shock and awe!
There’s this stuff our brain produces called dopamine, which is a “feel good” hormone that our brains transmit when we’re engaged in doing something pleasurable (“a hormone and neurotransmitter that’s an important part of your brain’s reward system. Dopamine is associated with pleasurable sensations, along with learning, memory, motor system function, and more”). It’s a good thing and one of the sister hormones of serotonin (a neurotransmitter), “[which] helps regulate your mood as well as your sleep, appetite, digestion, learning ability, and memory), oxytocin (often called the “love hormone,” oxytocin is essential for childbirth, breastfeeding, and strong parent-child bonding. This hormone can also help promote trust, empathy, and bonding in relationships, and oxytocin levels generally increase with physical affection like kissing, cuddling, and sex), and endorphins ( aka.”runners high,” your body’s natural pain reliever, which your body produces in response to stress or discomfort. Endorphin levels also tend to increase when you engage in reward-producing activities, such as eating, working out, or having sex).” - Healthline. Lembke continues, “In addition to addictive substances like sugar and opioids, there is also a whole new class of electronic addictions that didn’t exist until about 20 years ago: texting, tweeting, surfing the web, online shopping and gambling. These digital products are engineered to be addictive, using flashing lights, celebratory sounds and ‘likes’ to promise ever-greater rewards just a click away.”
So, what’s the problem with these happy doses of feeling good? With due respect for the miracles of technology and those who have facilitated and developed these capacities, keeping us connected, access to millennia of information, entertainment by way of movies on-demand or gaming, it has also had the unintended consequence of, ironically, keeping us apart and hamstringing our desires, and, by extension, our abilities to interact on a human level. Isolation and suicide rates are up 40% in the last 20 years; Suicide rates for those under the age of 18 are up a whopping 70%. 70%, people!! We would argue that the dopamine effect of immediate gratification (“likes,” followers, gaming with people all over the world anonymously, etc.) has become so ubiquitous and “normal” that personal interaction doesn’t even come close to the high we experience from these external and largely phantom participatory online engagements. What is NOT an apparition is real, true connection and engagement with other humans which is not, we’ll say it again, an immediate gratification endeavor. As much as we’d like to have a thumbs up or a heart emoji after every interaction with a fellow human, it’s just not how relationships work and the skills towards competency take practice (I know, broken record!).
Lembke sites, as an example, a 20-something patient in her psychiatric practice who presented with anxiety, depression and was flirting with suicide. 20 years ago, she would have prescribed an antidepressant, but in this case, after further questioning, she discovered that this young person was “playing video games most every day and late into every night.” He was addicted to dopamine. The good news is that this addiction is repairable. Our brains have the ability to restabilize the balance between a dopamine high and our more normal levels of homeostasis, which is where we usually reside in a healthy state. But the addiction has to be broken in order to find this chemical balance which can be difficult and let’s face it, hard! “It’s hard to see cause and effect when we’re chasing dopamine. It’s only after we’ve taken a break from our drug of choice that we’re able to see the true impact of our consumption on our lives…...despite increased access to all of these feel-good drugs, we’re more miserable than ever before.”
Why, you ask? Because we’re human, and by definition require personal interaction and engagement! Look, technology, smart phones, social media, gaming (and I’m sure a myriad of other “connection” platforms we don’t even know about!) are here to stay - which isn’t necessarily a bad thing with balance in how much time we spend on them and how important we allow them to become to our everyday lives. Those electronic leashes to our work and social lives are part of our lives, so let’s use them sparingly to the extent that we’re able and remember to talk to one another - actually talk. Communication is a gift to humanity, so let’s receive it, honor it and embrace this reward to being human, shall we?
Until next time……