Experience carnival (and life) more fully using neuroscience, and a social media break.
Social media today is designed to offer instant gratification and endless enjoyment. It is often based on an endless scroll that offers no cue to end and, if you let it, can suck you in for hours! There is a dark downside to this though and it affects many parts of your life, including things you enjoy, like carnival.
Using endless apps like what we find in social media activate the pleasure centres in our brains. Dopamine is released and using them feels good. In nature when this happens during eating or sex or accomplishing a goal, you get a high. This high quickly fades and you are motivated to get back to work to get that high back. This mechanism in nature evolved to motivate our species to eat, reproduce and later on, to get shit done!
In our digital world of endless scrolling, you are inundated with a constant stimulation of dopamine release for hours at a time, day in and day out. One of the end results is becoming acclimated to that high level of dopamine. Think of it like how an alcoholic gets acclimated to a high level of alcohol so eventually that level is needed to simply feel normal. So social media users eventually need to use social media just to not feel down and depressed.
For heavy social media users like myself that leads to a lack of motivation. Procrastination becomes the norm. It takes your attention away from the people you love. It leads also to a decrease in pleasure for things that used to be very pleasurable as those dopamine highs are just barely more than your daily social media dopamine levels you have all day. You no longer feel the infinite high of the joys of life that used to motivate you to work hard LIKE CARNIVAL. I refuse to take the chance that this is also going to happen to my carnival high. Too much money has been spent!
How to fix this?
There are different ways. Firstly, DONT SCROLL SOCIAL MEDIA WHEN YOU FIRST WAKE UP.
Change your morning routine. Do some exercise, talk to your partner etc.
You could go COLD TURKEY and just eliminate the social media apps all together. But we all use these apps occasionally to get info so that may not be ideal.
Using DIGITAL WELL BEING functions in your phones operating system is a good idea. The phone will limit your use of the apps, as long as you have the willpower to not change the time limits.
Set aside times where you DON’T HAVE EASY ACCESS TO YOUR PHONE. Most adults hate the thought of technology implants in their bodies….but also spend 99% of their day able to access their phone without moving their feet. In this case the phone is FUNCTIONALLY the same as an implant!
Set aside some hours daily where the phone isn’t easily accessible and you get a chance to focus on something else and the people around you. Leave the phone in your gym bag. Leave it in your locker at work.
Over time, this digital detoxing can lead you back to normal Dopamine levels and get you back on track to enjoy actual real life more than the imaginary social media universe our phones want us to live in.
