Ditch Your Addictions #3: Digital Addiction

I want to talk about this Digital Addiction that took over the whole world, starting from kids to even old people, not missing anyone that has access to the internet. This is a little different from the other types of addiction because it only happens in people’s minds, the substances like sugar or nicotine being replaced with the feedback from other people.

But it does work the same because the feedback people receive through likes on Facebook or comments send signals to your brain to release dopamine that, again, will make you feel good. The main problem with this is that it’s powerful mainly that people have no idea it’s happening.

How it works

The psychology behind it is that everyone wants to be appreciated by other people, because looking at the past before technology, it’s something normal to want to be liked by your community. On cave man’s time, the feedback was crucial because if you were doing something wrong, you would’ve got your ass kicked from the tribe, and no one could survive alone, in the woods.

But if you were doing something right, you were getting rewarded, appreciated by the community thus your brain would release dopamine and those things are hardwired into our brains even now.

At the moment, this is out of control, especially that every kid wants to be famous like some celebrities from TV and because they receive hundreds of likes from unknown people on Instagram makes them think they are famous and appreciated by their communities, reacting precisely like the cave man.

Ditch it

The social media like Facebook were designed to make people always come back to them to get their dose of dopamine through notifications. Opening the fridge to see if there’s something new got now replaced with opening your social media to see if you have notifications and the thing is that there’s always something new to be seen; thus you will always want to come back to them.

And I’ve always seen people checking out a shitload of platforms just to get their fix of dopamine, and if they don’t receive it, they seem sadder, the hell, this even happened to me a few times.

Another problem with platforms like Facebook is that they make you feel like your life is boring and because everyone that’s posting stuff there makes sure to be only perfect pictures at fancy events. Thus, if you’re staying home on a Friday night working for your future, you feel like you’re missing out on something because they have fun and you don’t.

Conclusion

I understood this a long time ago, and if you still appreciate your free time and mind, I advise you to do as I did. If you don’t want to delete your accounts because you may still find the chat useful as I do, you could just to disable your feed, so no posts appear when you log in, so you can’t directly see their shitty lives anymore.

I don’t get why people would even spend their time on social platforms like Facebook or Instagram if they are already on Steem and they can invest their spare time here, so maybe sometime in the future, they will be able to have a better life.

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The pictures are from Pixabay: 1, 2, 3, 4.

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