Name: Why your phone is making you sad
Uploaded: 2023-10-18T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 9 min 45 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Just 15 years ago, only 20% of people access the internet from their phone. Now, it's up to 91%.

Adults spend 11 hours per day interacting with media.

71% of people never turn off their phone.

31% of people admit to not being able to control their phone use.

And 17.3% of parents spend more time on their phone than with their children.

Our brains have not evolved to deal with these devices.

The science behind why we are also compulsively addicted to our phones is freaking scary.

So today, first up, we're going to explain the new research about how your phone is changing your brain, why it's making you more bored, sad, unable to focus and why you can't go anywhere without it.

Then we'll try to figure out if you are actually addicted to your phone clinically.

And at the end of the episode, go over the top three best research back tips to decrease phone use and gain back control of your life.

First up, what your phone is doing to your brain.

We've all heard of the neurotransmitter, dopamine as that feel good reward, chemical in your brain, but it also plays a major role in evading behavior.

Genetically engineered mice, unable to make dopamine, will not even seek out food and starve to death when the food is placed just inches from their mouths.

Dopamine is therefore important in our motivation to do evolutionarily beneficial behaviors.

Like have sex, eat food or have good social interactions with people.

Also to be clear, high dopamine substances don't actually have dopamine in them, but they trigger the release of dopamine in your brain.

Chocolate, for example, increases the basal dopamine of a rat in a box by 55% and sex by 100%.

And there are three main pathways in your brain that involve the neurotransmitter, dopamine.

They're called the mesocortical, mesolimbic, nigrostriatal pathways.

These become activated when anticipating and experiencing rewards.

And the thing is that every time you get a notification, laugh at a funny TikTok video or get a follower on Instagram,

these neuronal processes in your brain become stronger through a process called long-term potentiation.

Smartphones give us an unlimited supply of dopamine and stimuli to these specific pathways in our brain.

Therefore, these pathways in our brain are getting stronger and now watch hundreds of pieces of content on TikTok in a few minutes,

you scroll through Twitter, seeing memes, images, jokes at record speed or you interact with a large group of friends in group chats or on Instagram DMs.

All of those things are releasing dopamine and those brain pathways making them stronger.

And you're getting these feelings without ever having to like leave the house.

All you have to do is be on your phone to get that neurological impact.

And it has and found that this could be leading to a sad malaise and depression with life.

Rats in a diverse novel stimulating environment have a proliferation of dopamine release compared to those who are in their same old lab cage.

But if those same rats are pretreated with a dopamine stimulant before entering this enriched novel environment,

they fail to show the synaptic changes that happens with the novel stimulating environment

Because we're having constant dopamine hits from our phone, the novel aspects of our day-to-day life become less exciting.

On top of it, new studies have found that these phones are decreasing our attention spans, making it harder for us to focus and harder for us to delay gratification.

Known as delay discounting, people who use their phones more are more likely to think that the value of a reward goes down the longer you have to wait for it.

The pursuit of constant pleasure can lead to antonia, the inability to feel pleasure of any kind.

A study from two years ago found that young people who spend seven hours or more a day interacting with their screens are twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression or anxiety than those who use screens more moderately.

A 2018 study found that students who trimmed their use of social media to 30 minutes a day had significant improvements in well-being.

Cell phone use is positively associated with anxiety and results in negative association with willingness to engage in face to face communication.

Teens who spend five hours daily on their mobile devices are 71% more likely to develop risk factors for suicide compared to those who own use their devices for an hour,

Increased TikTok use has been linked to increased upward social comparison, which is comparing yourself to others online who seem to have better lives than you or a fear of missing out.

This can make you want to check your phone even more as the short-term addictive dopamine-driven hits, create feedback loops that make you compulsively check for notifications more

And these apps are designed to give you that dopamine hit so you compulsively check for them.

You might notice that every time you go on Instagram or TikTok, there's a new like notification, they'll hold those likes back so that every time you go on, they show you that someone has interacted with your page.

Now let's find out if you are in fact addicted to your phone.

Researchers use dopamine as a measure for how addictive a substance can be.

And since we now know that your phone is constantly giving you dopamine hits, this is why researchers and clinicians are worried about the addictive potential of your phone.

Addiction broadly defined as the continued and compulsive consumption of a substance or behavior despite its harm to yourself or others.

And these next five questions are important to understand if you are in fact addicted to your phone.

Do you want to look at your phone at the expense of other activities such as talking to your partner, talking to your kids, talking to a baristal, working out or interacting with friends.

Are you happier when you get lots of likes?

Are you sad or angry if you get less likes on a post, does a picture of someone else trigger your mood to change for the worse?

This is a serious concern because this means that your phone can be controlling your life.

I notice that this can happen to me I post and I'm looking to see how many likes it gets.

I see a photo of someone else having a really good time and maybe I'm having a bad day and it makes me feel worse.

I'm like, "Ok, so I guess I might be addicted to my phone."

Tolerance. Do you need to spend increasing amounts of time on your phone?

This isn't your fault if this is true because this can happen because of the neuro adaptation of the dopamine systems in your brain.

It means that you need more phone checking, more new apps in order to get the same amount of pleasure you might have needed before.

Wthdrawal. Do you feel angry or maybe you can't focus or you're uneasy when you don't have access to or are on your phone?

This also isn't your fault because if you are used to checking your phone, numerous studies have found that putting down your phone can trigger the release of cortisol.

Therefore, to get rid of this anxious feeling that the cortisol is giving you, you pick up your phone to see if anything has happened or changed.

Putting down the phone doesn't shut off your brain.

Our phone addiction doesn't stop when we put down our phone and some cases, it can make us more aware of it.

And finally, relapse. Do you try to decrease your phone use and find that you can't?

I have tried so many different ways to decrease my phone use and it feels like I always end up back where I started.

If you think that this could be you in any way, you are not alone.

78% of people in a recent poll said they could not live without their phone, but we can change this.

Our brains have neuroplasticity, we can rewire our brains.

So these are the top three scientific-backed tips to try and decrease your phone use.

To start, there is a lot of varied research about how long it takes to change these brain pathways in your brain.

Some people say a month, some people say three months, some studies say two years.

And since we can't fully have abstinence from our phones, it's how we talk to our family to our kids.

These tips are rooted in the fact that you will have to continue to use your phone.

Rats given unlimited access to cocaine gradually increase lever pressing for more cocaine over time to the point of physical exhaustion and even death.

Rats who have access to cocaine for only one hour per day use steady amounts over time and don't press the lever for more cocaine per unit time.

Restricting phone use to narrow units of time, one hour per day, for example,

may be the key to avoid compulsive elevating phone consumption that comes with the unlimited access we have to our phones.

This way, you can keep up with your DMs, text your friends make plans and let people know you're putting your phone away.

The science says your brain can readapt and gain better control this way

If you think that there are certain trigger apps such as Instagram or TikTok that you want to not use for a month, you log out and give your password to a friend or family.

Therefore, you have to ask them for it back to use these apps.

Other physical binding techniques are turning off your phone at 9 p.m. and putting it in a drawer until the next day.

Sometimes the compulsiveness comes from how close the phone is to you physically.

Another thing is to work with people within your house, whether it's roommates or family to have device-less meals.

Trying to make your phone mean less to you.

One easy thing to do is to put it on gray scale so it becomes more boring.

Only check social media dating apps or high dopamine reward apps on your computer.

So your phone is for texting emails and more boring stimuli.

Also delete any apps that you find meaningless or that you're wasting time on and you don't even care about.

Make sure your phone is not your alarm that is too meaningful of a concept and charge your phone in a cumbersome area overnight, maybe in a drawer that you can't access.