I tried to quit social media — here’s what happened.
Unpredicted rewards release dopamine in your brain and keep you addicted.
Social media these days have become integral part of our life ,we can’t imagine our life without social media in it. From entertainment to news and notices everything is depending upon social media apps and websites these days. No matter how hard you try, it seems impossible to breakout from the chain of social media. Some or most of the social media use artificial intelligence or algorithms to bring you curated recommendations in your news feed so that you keep watching the content and keep scrolling forever. I mean it’s obvious isn’t it ? you are obviously going to watch the content that you like.
The addiction
As soon as you open your eyes in the morning your hand automatically searches for your phone and your mind starts to scour the web to know what’s happening in the world. Duh! obviously something interesting is always happening somewhere in the world. You get so tied up in the routine of using social media that you completely lose your sense of time as well. Just while after waking up even before you manage to freshen up and look at your face in the mirror, a ding sound alerts you about some posts maybe and there are your friends enjoying their great life looking better than ever, flexing their photos on Instagram.
One post after another, one video after another ,one app after another ,binge watching a whole season ,and completely overloading your brain from all the digital content and without even realizing what is happening right next you, your day just goes by, you feel unproductive and think everyone else is better than you. You forget things you used to remember. The screen time gets increasing day by day and you start feeling stressed. Yes, that’s what social media is doing to you. It’s hard to grasp for the addicted mind about what’s happening but it’s happening and it is real.
So, the same thing happened to me as well . I as well as any other person would have, after realizing all this ,thought of deleting these apps from my phone and life. But every time I found a reason to install it back again, and again started to enjoy the dopamine hit I was getting by watching whatever shitty cringy content that struck upon my feed .
The chemical effect
Of course it’s chemical, the chemical called dopamine gets released whenever you feel happy or excited and it creates reward seeking loops ,that’s why we keep on scrolling to get that unexpected reward that will make us feel excited .Social media’s use this feature called infinite scroll which basically means that you are never going to run out of content on your feed and you will keep on scrolling forever and something that you like or enjoy is going to come , and we keep on scrolling to get that just another hit of dopamine. Another main reason is also that we need validation from people out there on internet ,that’s why keep on checking if someone have liked or commented on our post or not and we feel sad if it hasn’t happened so.
All in all these apps of infotainment are sometimes useful as well, it help connect you and people all over the world and if you are smart and productive you can utilize these tools to profit you in life.
But as it is also like any other kind of addiction don’t try to abruptly quit social media for some time because then you will start craving for it and making yourself feel bad about it , instead replace your this habit with something that is useful and productive, decrease the amount of time that you spend on such apps on your daily basis. You can view your time spent on such apps on the “digital wellbeing” feature on your phone or can install another app which does the same thing.
You can get out of this
Trust me, just abruptly trying to get out of this rabbit hole after a sudden realization about the defects , that isn’t going to help you, but slowly decreasing the amount of time spent browsing these apps is .Not touching your phone the first thing in the morning, constant awareness about it’s harm can help you win over these apps in your “smartphone” (which is basically making you dumb in real life) ,that you can’t get rid off even after wanting to. OR you can also choose to spend your time writing blogs on internet like I am doing right now rather than mindlessly scrolling through web.
This is just my first time trying to write a blog on internet ,I hope that I’ll be writing better in coming days. Thank you!