Chasing Dopamine
Addiction and craving — for your phone or anything — depend on a complex interplay of brain chemicals, but the neurotransmitter dopamine is at the heart of it. Dopamine is a feel-good neurochemical messenger that carries signals across brain synapses, responsible for motivation and reward-seeking behavior, and essential to neuroplastic change. Neuroplastic change is what allows a habit or addiction to form in the first place.

Every time your phone dings, and you check it to see a text, a like, or a message, your brain rewards you with a shot of dopamine. Over time, the dopamine gets released earlier and earlier until just seeing your phone or hearing it ding causes an anticipatory dopamine surge. The dopamine preceding the action motivates you to perform the behavior creating the urge to act.

You start to develop the need to check and use your phone more and more to achieve the same brain response. This dopamine reward-seeking behavior could cause you to lose interest in other activities. Before you know it, you are spending excessive amounts of time on the phone.

Apple says that iPhone users unlock their phones 80 times a day. Even worse, research firm Dscout found that we tap, type and swipe our smartphones more than 2,600 times a day, on average. The majority of us check in front of our kids, during meetings, while we eat and while we should be sleeping.”

All that time spent staring at your phone could be damaging your mental health.

Ditch The Tech and Start Using Your Brain