I just read a great piece on Substack about what it’s like to break the chemical addiction cycle of the internet, and specifically, social media. The dopamine loop. The pleasure-pain balance. Interesting stuff.
You all likely know by now that when your phone does that little alert thing, be it a beep, tweet, chirp, or vibration, your body gives you a tiny shot of dopamine. Some have calculated the impact on everything from attention loss to lost productivity. The internet and its ubiquity, combined with the accessibility of the mobile phone, have turned large portions of us into miserable little addicts.
Some of us get to be miserable big addicts, obsessed with clicks, likes, and shares, and it consumes us. This is, to some degree, a part of the mental health issues of younger folks, particularly girls, but not limited to them. But this article was by a woman who had flirted with remission but kept finding herself doomscrolling and finally decided to delete TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and so on.
Before I share her thing, and it’s interesting, one of the reasons I don’t do a lot of commenting or spend time on platforms like Facebook is that I realized early in their dawning age how much time you could lose there. Add the bot accounts, and you could get sucked into who knows what for how long. I don’t have that kind of time.
Running a website involves a lot of things that have nothing to do with creating and sharing content. And while engagement is a critical factor in growing an audience, I have to let readers do that work based on their tolerance for it, because if I spend too much time on socials or in comments, I won’t have time to create or manage the content everyone comes here to see.
I am online every day for most of the day and still don’t have the luxury of getting trapped in doomscrolling or a never-ending back-and-forth on social. I’m not saying I wouldn’t mind it now and again, and I’d love to have more time for the comments section on my website, but most of my time is vacuumed up by the business of creating content and finding revenue to keep the lights on.
And as I said above, you won’t find me in a comment war on Facebook, and I can’t seem to find time to even look at Gab, Minds, Truth, GETTR, or MeWe. We share content there, but we can’t engage to build an audience. The content and our readers have to do that work and I get that the contradiction this creates is real with a caveat. With few exceptions, we create long-form content. The addiction issue isn’t limited to but is primarily fed by short, easy to consume video ad the comment streams they generate.
Enough of me. Here’s a nice pull quote for you.
Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist at Stanford and author of Dopamine Nation, calls it the pleasure-pain balance. Your brain is constantly trying to maintain equilibrium. Every time you get a hit of dopamine — a like, a notification, a new post loading in your feed — your brain registers that pleasure and immediately tips itself to compensate, pushing toward pain to restore balance. The result is that you need more of the stimulus just to feel neutral. And when you remove the stimulus entirely, you go through a period of genuine withdrawal with intense symptoms of anxiety, restlessness, and that compulsive reaching for the thing that isn’t there anymore.
That’s why “just delete it” sounds so simple but isn’t. Your nervous system has been recalibrated around that dopamine hit. The discomfort of not having it is very real, even when the thing itself was making you miserable. It’s a virtual toxic relationship.
The digital universe grew up around my world, which saw things as tools. The internet is a tool. Search is a tool. AI is a tool. A tool for what? I use them to learn, conduct research, and better understand the real world. I am also an avid reader. I used to maintain a massive library of printed material. I trimmed it down to fewer than 1000 titles, I think, but I still read every day; I just do it on my phone. Kindle. Books. Plus the articles. I spend very little time on short video (reels, Instagram), but when I do, it’s dogs, comedians, and the odd snippet from a political podcaster.
And there’s GraniteGrok. Longer form than the speed demon doom scrolling TikTok’r could probably handle. The Morning Update is 3-5 minutes. Quick Shots are 70-90-second teasers that get people to the longer original and to read the long-form content.
I’m trying to convince myself I’m not a pusher because I can see what the disease is like, and the linked article is nice and long and worth your time. Share it with someone you think could use it. And FYI – there’s some God and Jesus stuff in there that’s good for you too, but not a lot. The less-than-religious will get what they need from the rest, the bulk of which is her personal experience balanced with a touch of clinical reference.
The answer is, as with all things, balance and moderation. I, for example, prefer to be moving and working and doing but am fully capable of stillness and silence. I sit with Cosmo in the grass and listen to nature. Feel the sun, hear the birds and insects, and appreciate the breeze. I love peace, quiet, and contemplation, and I find time for it. I make time to count my blessings and appreciate my good fortune in the simplest of things. I was born in America. I have a roof over my head and shoes on my feet. My wife loves me, my dog loves me, my kids probably do. I’m not rich, but I’m not poor.
I do things with real people. Not every day, outside my family, but every week.
And yes, I have internet access and a mobile phone (along with several other connected devices), but they are tools. I’m never going to become a social media doom-scroller. I’m sure I could adopt an addictive enough personality for it. I do this every day. I’m just not wired to put that ahead of more productive pursuits. Not everyone is like that. They may need to find a path away from the addiction.
I hope the linked article helps.
