Tired after a long day of work, you sit down and reach for your phone just to check a message. This takes about 10 seconds, and you immediately open Instagram or Reddit after that. These 10 seconds morph into an hour unwittingly and you later regret whiling away your hour on social media.

Sounds familar? Your brain may be inundated with an addiction to ’empty calories’ behaviour and your lack of control a sign that you are developing an addiction.

How do you feel after eating a big Mac vs eating a homecooked dinner? The answer is obvious, satiety and satisfaction. An easy dopamine hit is posting a selfie to get likes which is instantly gratifying. In fact, checking social media notifications exploits the same neural circuitry as slot machines and thus explains its addictiveness, according to this Guardian article.

A more satisfying activity that stimulates your brain for example is, trying out a new recipe for dinner, playing a piece of music with an instrument, reading a book, physical activities that work your body like running, yoga, and boxing. Such activities give your brain a ‘work out’. Your brain is like a muscle, so use it and take care of it.

Why is content so addictive?

According to this United Nations report published in Mar 2023, the information economy has been replaced by the attention economy. Companies are innovating to capitalise on gathering large amounts of data on consumers so as to attract views and eyeballs. Large amounts of content is being generated to influence purchasing decisions and mindshare.

The problem with this is increasingly, the popularity of influencers on social media and the proliferation of advertorial style articles which are both written to sell products and also to improve SEO(search engine optimisation) rankings have led to the bulk of this content to be biased, and more alarmingly, disingenuously presented as fact.

The amount of digital data roughly doubles every two years while the population on earth and the amount of time we have is finite. There is now a greater barrage of information out there than ever before with the advent of technology and the internet.

The content being created is increasingly being designed in a variety of ways to induce addiction as we crave simulation from passive such as watching tv shows, scrolling on our smartphones for latest ‘stories’, or emails or checking our whatsapp messages.

What should we do about it?

While talking to a friend when working on this article, we compared screen time usage statistics measured by our smartphones. We found that we averaged 4 to 6 hours daily of screen time. The fact that we use our laptops for work for 8 hours five days a week gave us pause to try to change our behaviour, for the sake of our eyes and bodies.

Some people have gone out of their way to break this habit. ‘Dopamine fasting’ is a controversial practice popularised by California psychiatrist Dr. Cameron Sepah in 2019, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco which quickly become a fad in Silicon Valley, and which was written on by the New York Times. Dopamine fasting involves taking long breaks from using your phone, excessive internet surfing, gaming, porn, among others.

Why controversial? Dr Peter Grinspoon from Harvard Health Publishing debunks the misnomer. “Dopamine is just a mechanism that explains how addictions can become reinforced”, Dr Grinspoon explains, “You can’t “fast” from a naturally occurring brain chemical”.

As with any other practice, a few have taken the concept too far by literally abstaining from activities that are pleasurable. Dopamine is a hormone that makes you feel good and feeling pleasure is not in itself something we should abstain from or curb.

In fact, you could argue that we should seek out more activities that induce dopamine, for an eudaimonic life for living well and doing well. To live well, limit activities that are addictive and detrimental to your health. To do well, allocate your time to activities you enjoy and refine your skills when practicing your activities. So next time before you reach for your phone, remember to be intentional about it and allocate your time wisely.