Why You Can’t Stop Scrolling (End-Stage Screen Addiction)

these problems of lack of willpower I don't know what I want in life I'm not motivated enough I get bored easily I can't focus oh everyone has ADHD now all of these problems are related to screens and what we're seeing is that people who develop screens app developers platforms video game designers the way that they compete with each other is by activating more circuits of your brain today we're going to talk about end stage screen addiction and this is becoming an increasingly important topic because as addictions are progressing for years and years and years they

start to change or transform over time in the early stages of alcohol addiction we have things like Cravings we get the shakes we get withdrawal fair enough but if you look at endstage alcohol addiction it starts to affect a lot of other organ systems in our body we can start to see cardiotoxicity in our heart we start to see hepatomegaly which is a swelling of the liver liver curosis liver cancer and if you really look at it from the surface level alcohol and it the way it affects your brain is very different from like the

organ system of the liver right when we think about okay we have a therapist who is trained in alcohol addiction they're not necessarily trained in therosis of the liver and this is what we're starting to see in endstage screen addiction where it starts off with a clear idea of addiction I can't put this screen away right it may start with okay I want to play a video game and then what's happening is I can't get rid of the screen so when I go to the toilet I'm taking the screen with me and then it end

ends up with instead of taking the game to the toilet what I'm going to do is move the toilet and replace my chair with the toilet so that I can play in a degenerate way way longer than any other normal human and this is actually what we're starting to see in endstage screen addiction this is a relatively New Concept because frankly it's a relatively new phenomenon the smartphone was invented I think around 2007 so now two decades in to people using screens as a psychiatrist I am seeing manifestations of screen addiction that are almost like

entirely new and the real issue here is that most of the problems that I see people struggling with like I have a lack of motivation I don't know what to do in my life I'm sort of directionless I have difficulty with Willow all of these I believe are manifestations of actually years and years of screen addiction hey y'all if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we discussed to your life to actually create change check out Dr K's guide DeMent Health the guide synthesize my years of training as a monk along with years

of clinical experience as a psychiatrist to cover common topics like meditation ADHD and Trauma the guides include over 100 additional videos that can be navigated based on your needs or interests or in a more open Choose Your Own Adventure format the guides are now available in the YouTube store below and if they're a little bit outside of your price point you can check out a piece of them with our free resource packs which are also linked below so definitely check him out so let's start with the first manifestation of what I would call endstage screen

addiction which is terminal boredom so what we're starting to see is in the early stages of let's say some kind of screen addiction you want to play use the screen more and more and more but as you do this for years and years and years I'm starting to see a very scary clinical phenomenon of people being so intensely bored that they can't do anything so let's a little bit about how this works so at the beginning let's say I've got three dopamine receptors okay and I've got three molecules of dopamine this is a normal situation

so if I read a book my brain will release three molecules of dopamine they go over here and then I will get you know One X pleasure One X pleasure One X pleasure so if I read a book I've got a normal number of receptors a normal amount of dopamine and a normal amount of pleasure now when I add screens to the picture and I play video games or watch pornography or scroll on social media we increase the dopamine release over time so as we increase the dopamine release what actually happens now we're getting a

6X signal right because we're doubling the amount of dopamine our body does This Thing Called adapt or develops tolerance so anytime we overstimulate a particular receptor that receptor actually gets down regulated so if we drink a lot of alcohol we will develop tolerance to alcohol if we use a lot of marijuana or nicotine we will develop tolerance to it and where does tolerance happen tolerance happens by the elimination of our receptors so the signal release is still the same right but now what's happening is our responsiveness to it is actually decreasing so what this ends

up doing is once I'm I cut back on one receptor I literally remove it from the membrane of my cell now the video game instead of giving me a four x uh 6X response is now giving me a 4X response because there's only enough space for four of these molecules so what tends to happen over time is this situation gets worse so the the less fun games become the longer we have to play them so now what I'm doing is I'm increasing my signal to 9x and I'm super saturating my receptors so now I'm back

to a 6X signal right and then what happens is my brain develops further tolerance so now we're like hold on a second the dopamine signal is way too high let's get rid of it and so we remove another receptor and now what happens is we have very few receptors so what does this look like over time so the stage one of this addiction is games are fun stage two of this addiction is games are less fun stage three of this addiction which a lot of people have experienced is that other things are are less fun

right and so this happens a lot where when you play a lot of games and we saw this like you know a few years into technology addictions developing like even when I started streaming 5 years ago many people would say okay I have a lot of trouble things just don't aren't very fun for me and now even in the last five years what I've seen I I think it's kind of crazy to think about but like you know smartphones were invented let's say 17 years ago so if we're talking about the end stage of addiction

even 5 years ago this was 12 years ago addictions weren't quite as bad and now that an additional people have been addicted for an additional 5 years we're starting to see a new thing which I would call terminal boredom and I see this so much it's been growing a lot in the people that I work with Over The Last 5 Years where it used to be that they had difficulty enjoying things like reading books or going for walks or things like that people like oh that's just isn't as fun and now what I'm seeing is

a terminal level of boredom where anytime you do anything that is not related to a screen you experience an intense and unsolvable level of boredom it starts to feel like reading is like torture your mind can't focus you're kind of doing this and this you're like okay maybe I need to sign up for a class or I need to do a coding boot camp but like the second you try to do anything else it seems like your brain just doesn't grab on to it at all things that you used to feel enjoyable are just not

enjoyable anymore so terminal boredom is characterized by three things an intense experience of boredom which means when you try to do anything you just feel like this is not fun or enjoyable at all the second thing that I've started to see is almost a physiological restlessness or physical discomfort when you're not using a screen and the third thing is an inability to focus your mind on anything that is not screen oriented or highly dopamin what people end up with is an inability to do anything that is not like related to a screen this is how

we're seeing these people like neats right not in education employment or training or people just feel really crippled in other dimensions of their life the second thing that I've started to see which is super scary is something that I'd call an introspective failure so introspective failure starts with doing my work when I'm supposed to and using my free time gaming over time what this results at is missed opportunities right so what happened what I'm seeing more and more of is like okay I finished my first year of college I kind of got bees but in

the summer instead of doing an internship this is free time so I'm going to do more gaming okay and as we start to miss out on opportunities are possibilities in life this this is the range of my possibility when I'm a freshman in college and then I skip my first set of internships in my first summer right so this is the gaming during the summer now my range of possibility ities is narrower and then I don't do extracurricular activities because I'm going home and I'm gaming in my free time which means that I'm spending like

I lose out on more opportunities and then eventually what happens is I finish I graduate from college but I don't have any extracurriculars I haven't done any internships and so then this ends up with it's very very very difficult for me to have a job so it starts out that that gaming or screen time is in is eating up our free time and then we end end up with a very very narrow range of stuff so the other thing that tends to happen here is if you look at this trend what's happening our screen time

is increasing and so as our screen time increases this creates a second problem which we know that screens doesn't matter if it's social media doesn't matter if it's pornography video games suppress our amydala and lyic system so with this results in is decreased emotional awareness right so when I'm feeling when I'm not feeling good about myself I can play a game and a game will artificially give me a sense of pleasure or joy and then when it gives me that sense of pleasure or Joy it'll also suppress the shame the sadness the anxiety or whatever

so what I'm starting to see is something that I would call introspective failure which is a combination of loss of opportunities and a heavy heavy amount of emotional suppression so what this kind of results in is at the very beginning it's like okay I'm going to major in this particular thing I want to be programmer when I grow up maybe I want to work for a video game company and over time as I have fewer and fewer opportunities as I don't socialize with people as I don't have a mentor and an internship as I stop

doing extracurriculars my view of what I want from the future starts to narrow right I don't really know what the possibilities are because they're all just vague possibilities in the in my mind so I don't really know what's out there and as I don't know what's really out there that combined with suppressing my internal signals results in an inability to understand what I even want from life so this starts out with okay I have some dreams and I'm gaming the dreams get narrower I'm gaming more the dreams get narrower I'm gaming more I try to

do things I try to apply for jobs that doesn't work so I can't support those kinds of dreams then I have difficulty socializing with my friends because they're so much further ahead of me I can't relate to them they're going on vacations because they have like you know intro level Developer jobs and they're making 120k a year and I'm not making any money so I fall further and further behind and as I fall further behind my technology use increases as my technology use increases my emotions get suppressed and this ends up with being completely directionless

in life I don't know what I want I used to have hopes I used to have dreams sometimes I have fantasies but I don't even know like what I want my life to look like I just know I don't want it to be this but the challenge is that if we suppress our emotions that takes away a primary motivational drive to affect change so if we think about emotions like sadness anger shame what is the purpose of these emotions when I feel ashamed that's my brain giving me motivation hey don't ever feel ashamed again therefore

you need to change your appearance you need to change the way that you talk you need to get into shape you need to make more money shame is something that drives us towards ctive action but what I'm starting to see is this introspective failure where people don't even know what they want anymore as a consequence of lack of opportunities and a lack of like being able to connect with yourself so once we get into this introspective failure then we sort of result in people really being stuck because in the past the problem was I know

what I want but I can't bring myself to do it and we eventually 8 9 10 years after doing this stuff I don't even know what I want anymore and if I don't know what I want how on Earth am I supposed to find motivation because now I even lack it's not about a lack of motivation it's about a complete lack of Direction plus a lack of motivation now there's another thing that kind of relates to this which is the third thing that we're going to talk about the third feature of end stage screen addiction

which is a lack of willpower so this is really important to understand when we say a lack of willpower what a lot of like people who use screens will do is they'll say like okay this is where I am this is where I want to go okay this is the Direction I want to go but I cannot bring myself from here to here I'll get distracted I want to play video games I want to watch porn I want to eat a hot pocket right I want to exercise but I can't bring myself to do it

I lack willpower I Mo I lack discipline etc etc etc so this is what they describe but this is not actually a lack of willpower so let's understand how human behavior works okay so if a human being wants to go from here to here this involves two things there is a motivational drive plus a willpower to overcome resistance okay this is what results in Behavior does that kind of make sense so if we kind of think about going to the gym if I don't feel like going to the gym then I need to use a

lot of willpower but the cool thing about going to the gym if you talk to people who are like in shape and stuff right people who do a lot of like you know extracurriculars towards a particular professional goal they're not using willpower all the time in fact the majority of what they're using is actually like motivation right why am I going to extracurriculars because this is a goal that I have and I'm moving towards that goal so I'm actually motivated towards it so I want youall to understand this the less motivational drive you have the

more willpower you need in order to act and so what Gamers will experience what endstage screen addicts will experience is I don't have enough will that's correct they they they'll say I don't have any willpower that's incorrect what it really is is that I don't have enough willpower so the really crazy thing about endstage screen addicts that I work with is that their willpower is often times very high is actually way higher than other people now this may sound insane because you're sitting there and you're ask you're thinking to yourself I have no willpower so

let's use an example okay so if you take someone who has a mood disorder like depression this person doesn't do much throughout the day right they have difficulty they can't even get out of bed and if they get out of bed we look at this person and we say and this person subjectively believes I have very little willpower I can barely get out of bed but them getting out of bed is not a deficiency of willpower it is a complete loss of motivation this is something that we call anhedonia or amotivational drives these are common

in depression so the only thing that they can use to get out of bed is actually a very high amount of willpower because most of us when we wake up in the morning we're lucky enough to want to get out of bed right when you wake up in the morning and you get out of bed why do you get out of bed because you feel like peeing because you want your cup of coffee because you're ready to start the day because you want to be finished with work might as well get it over with or

you wake up on a Sunday and you're like I have nothing to do today I can't wait to get out of bed and do something fun so what we really see in depression is not a failure of willpower it is a failure of motivation and this is what we're starting to see in endstage screen addiction now you may say but Dr K didn't you already talk about that didn't we talk about introspective failure and sort of like not having a lack of having a lack of motivation fair enough we'll talk about motivation a little bit

more at the end but let's understand the mechanism for this lack of willpower and y'all may be surprised okay so we have a brain and in our brain we have different circuits we have different anatomical portions and we also have a that looks like a Metroid holy Jesus cool Metroid okay so in our brain we have all these different circuits and we have all these different biological drives so we have a drive towards agency this means I want to be in control of my life we have a drive towards Mastery I want to get good

at something we have a drive towards socialization or let's call it Community actually I that's a better word so we have a drive towards Community right so we want to connect with others we have a drive towards um identity we want to be someone in life right I want to be proud of the person that I am I want to be able to hold my head up high I want other people to speak well about me they're like oh who is all who is Dr K oh Dr K is really cool like we all want

this right last thing that we want is safety we have a very fundamental human Drive I don't need to put anything here because safety safety we have a fundamental human Drive of wanting to be safe so if we look at the human brain these kinds of drives motivate us to act okay so there's a really great example of this which is psychologists were looking at like why children don't give up when they're doing things like learning how to walk right so if you think about a child who's learning how to walk it's just full of

failure it's like you don't even know how to use your freaking legs or your feet like you suck at this kid you completely suck at it and yet children despite the fact that they fall despite the fact that they hurt themselves despite the fact that it's really really hard children don't give up when it comes to learning how to walk right so it's like a 25-year-old neat like it's very easy for me and you to give up on things that's what I did I gave up on life when I was like 18 or 19 years

old but for some reason kids don't give up even though objectively they experience way more failure than an adult does so what is it that drives a kid to learn how to walk to learn how to pick up objects it turns out that it's this thing called intent to Mastery so not just human beings but even if you look at like you know monkeys or Birds they're driven to become good at stuff so we see the intent to Mastery also manifest in things like you know why do people respect me for going to Harvard right

that that's more respectful than say going to the University of Texas which is where I did my undergrad why is that why do um people respect Olympic athletes more than like amateur athletes so we have this societal level thing where the harder something is to do the more you master it the more we respect it so that's just one example of the intent to Mastery but we also have a desire to be in control of our lives right all human beings want to be in control of Our Lives all human beings want some sense of

Community unless you've got like schizoid personality disorder all human beings want to be safe all human beings want to be proud of themselves so what does this have to do with motivational Drive really important to understand so the problem with technology is that it tricks us into satisfying these drives right so when I look at let's say I play am MOA and what what do I want to do like I was playing with someone yesterday who spent 10,000 hours playing am MOA okay so I want yall to think about this for second right so Malcolm

Gladwell has this 10,000 hour rule medical school is about 10,000 hours residency is probably even a little bit more but like I know people who have spent 10,000 hours in two separate video games let's say something like an FPS and aoba like I know people like this who spent 10,000 hours and in those 10,000 hours I did med school I'm not like trying to like a humble brag or Flex or anything I'm just pointing out to y'all like how much time we spend on this stuff right this is how long it took me to become

a psychiatrist this is how long it took me to get through medical school and we have people who will spend 10,000 hours doing this I probably spent close to 10,000 hours playing video games like in high school and college right so I'm in this Camp too but if you stop and think about it why the hell do people spend this much time playing video games like what the hell is going on in their brain where they can do this day after day after day after day after day dopamine is insufficient for this because if you

look at playing these games what happens I get this trophy woohoo and then I get this Trophy and then I get this Trophy and then I get this kind of trophy whatever right and then it has these Sparkles over here so if we look at video games the tricky thing that they do is that they start to satisfy all of these drives they give me a sense of control in my life because the real world I don't control anything right I don't control how much money I make I don't control what people like me or

not but in the video game I can play a single player RPG like balers gate and I can have complete control over everything I can even open up console commands and essentially be a God within the video game when it comes to Mastery games and social media and all these Tech platforms are really good at giving you trophies and giving you a sense that you've progressed right gameification I once went to a conference at Harvard Medical School where people were talking about like the gamification of a mental health app how can we turn a mental

health app into a game so that people stick with it so that they get become addicted to it but for their own benefit right I'm going to addict you but it will be good for you we get a sense of community so as we make more and more friends on Discord as we have these online relationships our drive to connect to other people actually decreases then we start to develop an identity right so I'm on the internet I Nubs right so you start to develop a ident of who you are you have a character you

have cosmetics and gaming companies understand this we have social media is all about crafting and artificial identity and then the other beautiful thing is that the internet is a very safe place right because if I don't like someone if I don't like my boss or if I get bullied at school I have to deal with them tomorrow right I don't get to run away from my bullies I have to go to school every day that's something that I lived for 10 years of my life is facing my bullies every single day and if I don't

like my boss like I have to stick with it for a little while but when it comes to video games hey I don't like this person the the games give us the opportunities to block players to avoid players I never want to see this person again if I don't like if I screw things up with one group of online friends I can just go join a different online group of friends if I get banned from one Community I can go to a place where I feel safe now the biggest problem here is that it's not

that these things just gratify these needs it's that when you use technology when you use social media to craft a sense of identity when you use Cosmetics to craft a sense of identity the problem is that it depletes your motivation to fix it in the real world there are just enough parts of your brain that get fooled by the artificial or virtual activation of these needs that then your brain doesn't feel hungry anymore to fix things in your real life right when I go home and I'm feeling lonely and I hop onto Discord and I'm

hanging out with my friends the drive the need the desperation to connect with other people just becomes something that I feel at the edges of my day right when I'm going to bed at night I kind of think back and I'm like man I really like long for human touch sometimes when I'm like taking a shower I start to think about how lonely I am but then the moment that the shower stops I have something playing on my phone and hahaa Arrested Development is so great right and then I'm back to the screens I'm back

to the social media I'm back to the video games and then all of my real needs get pushed to the side so this is what we're seeing with endstage screen addiction is that as more of your psychological needs get fulfilled the motivational drive to actually fix your life goes way down because it's kind of like thinking to yourself like I'll give you all an analogy so if my my body craves nutrition if I'm like I need to eat broccoli I I need to eat asparagus I need to eat lean proteins I need to eat whole

grains if I eat a couple of Twinkies and Doritos even though I'm not satisfying my nutrition I'm getting a ton of artificial calories and that kills my sense of hunger right so I was talking to a streamer who is like eats this cheesy rice and they're so calorically deficient they're so starving because they've been suppressing all of their hunger signals all of their nutritional signals that after a 10-hour gaming binge they'll like make a pot of rice and then they'll add like cheese to it and like they're like mac and cheese but just rice and

then you scoop it into your face so this is what technology is doing to us it's basically the cheesy rice for our brains it's very calorically dense and not nutritious at all but the problem is once you eat a belly once you have a belly full of cheesy rice your desire to eat broccoli decreases completely it's completely shot so in the end stage of screen addiction what starts to happen is at the very beginning we're getting part of our uh needs met in the real world and then we get some enjoyment out of life but

over I mean out of out of video games but over time what happens is we get fewer and fewer psychological needs met by the real world and then we rely on the virtual world to fulfill my sense of being good at something right this is why people tilt so much in video games it's like I I feel like such a loser in real life that I really want to dumpster some crappy POS new tube I'm going to put this person in their place on in a Reddit argument about quantum mechanics and philosophy or in a

video game when I'm going to you know I'm going to aim hack in deadlock because I need to feel like a winner right so this is what happens is and as we feel like a winner in a game like deadlock or whatever aim hacking whatever happens then that part of our brain gets a little bit satisfied as it gets a little bit satisfied our motivational Drive actually decreases as our motivational Drive decreases we do less in the real world as we do less in the real world then something scary happens we become dependent on the

screen to fulfill our psychological needs and that's ultimately what endstage screen addiction looks like it's a lack of willpower which is not a lack of willpower it's just you can't use willpower to substitute for a motivational drive at all right so if you're struggling with endstage screen addiction I want you to think about the subjective experience of doing something healthy of stopping to play the video game just look at yourself and look at how Herculean your effort is it is so hard to leave the house it is so hard to go for that third job

interview after you've been rejected from the first two if you really look at yourself it's not that there's a lack of willpower it's that the amount of willpower that you need to overcome your resistance is so high so that's because there's a lack of a motivational drive you really don't feel like doing it right so everything that you have to do has to require a ton of willpower let's talk about decay of motivational drive so this is Step number four now y'all may be saying but Dr K didn't we just talk about lack of motivational

Drive yeah so we've talked about two systems but now we're going to tie everything together so what I see in people is not just a lack of willpower but an overall failure of motivational drive and this has a couple of different impon components to it so we have to understand what dopamine does okay so now we're going to talk about dopamine so dopamine gives us pleasure gives us behavioral reinforcement and gives us craving so one is the psychological needs that get fulfilled through games and how that creates a lack of motivation but then there's also

motivation on a very specific dopaminergic nucleus accumbent level so let's understand this so if I eat a Twinkie I get a rush of pleasure and the part of my brain that gives me a rush of pleasure also creates a desire for a Twinkie tomorrow that's what we call behavioral reinforcement so I'm going to want a Twinkie tomorrow and then it also creates craving right so the way that we reinforce Behavior the way that we get the human organism to repeat the behavior is by giving us a craving now this is a huge problem because when

I do something like play a video game I get a rush of pleasure and then I create a craving to play the video game tomorrow so what I'm actually doing is motivate myself tomorrow to play a video game the moment that I have fun with something I feel motivated to do it again so if we look at something like falling in love falling in love is also mediated by dopamine I'm not talking about being attracted to someone and I'm not talking about being in love with someone in a long-term relationship so if you really look

at the process of falling in love where you're like oh my God the the I just want to touch this person I just need to be in their presence I want to smell oh my God just everything about them oh my God I can't stay away that falling in love that intoxicating falling in love is mediated by our dopam energic circuitry okay so it gives us pleasure and it creates Cravings towards that thing so now we run into another kind of motivational Drive problem which is that once we start using our dopamine on screens we

have less dopamine available to reinforce other behaviors okay so this is important to understand when it comes to dopamine we have a fixed quantity of dopamine in our brain okay it gets stored in these things called vesicles so we have these little pouches of dopamine that then get released out into the space between two neurons and then they float over to our dopamine receptors okay this is how it works now the really interesting thing is that we used to think that once we release dopamine it gets repackaged and we can use it again which is

somewhat true but clinically what I've really observed is that you basically have a fixed amount of dopamine every single day now what that means is that I I hope this makes sense so remember that dopamine creates behavioral reinforcement and craving so the way that you spend your dopamine today determines what you will want to do tomorrow so for example today I'm I'm just going to be straight with y'all it's Saturday at 2: p.m. I'm working okay why am I working on a a Saturday at 2: p.m. instead of taking a day off it's because when

I wake up in the morning I've got a fixed amount of dopamine and what I'm going to do is make a video now if we think about it the H if I have a ton of dopamine and I make a video like I'm loving this right now yall can look at my face like this is hype right like I'm doing something good for the world I feel good about it it's fun so now when I make a video I'm going to get eight units of dopamine released what this means is that tomorrow my desire to

work because I have dopam synergically reinforced doing work on a weekend right this is how I work six to seven days a week because when I wake up first thing in the morning what I try to do is do some work and then you feel good about it like you'll know what I mean think about the subjective experience of when you wake up in the morning you're like I'm going to like take care of some work today and then noon rolls around and you're like I've gotten so much done because you have utilized your dopamine

to reinforce your desire to work I've now motivated myself and if you do this properly you can even create cravings for work like it's beautiful now the problem with endstage screen addiction is that we wake up in the morning we have a limited amount of dopamine right we've developed tolerance so instead of three dopamine receptors I only have one I play a game and then I release a lot of this dopamine over here right so here's eight units and I get eight units for one unit of pleasure so then what happens since I'm resistant to

the dopamine I have to play something else I have to to watch anime I have to eat other kinds of food now I've suppressed my Hunger signals I'm going to use my last four units of dopamine to get a little bit more pleasure and then my dopamine stack is empty and once my dopamine stack is empty I try to work and then the problem is once my dopamine stack is empty I don't enjoy it right do you all enjoy work of course not because you have no dopamine left and if you have no dopamine left

you can't enjoy work and if you don't enjoy work there will be no craving no motivation or no behavioral reinforcement so this is what I tend to see in endstage screen addiction this process has gotten so bad that their dopaminergic tolerance is so high that even if they do some amount of work they don't feel any pleasure from it right and if they don't feel any pleasure that means we're not activating our dopaminergic circuitry which means I won't get behavioral reinforcement and I won't create cravings for myself the last dimension of end stage screen addiction

is executive dysfunction so so our frontal lobes do two things they plan well they do a lot more and execute actions and they control impulses so if you look at people who are like normal what they end up doing is planning for the future right they're like man I'm going to go to so I had friends like this right so when I was in high school I had friends who were also going to be doctors we were all going to be doctors and they're like yeah so one of my friends applied for a six-year accelerated

medical program where you basically go straight into med school after high school and she was kind of committed to doing what she wanted to do they plan and they move towards a particular future in a very like focused and aggressive way what our frontal lobes do they take abstract goals and they break them up into pieces like if I think about okay I want to be happy what is that that's an abstract goal like I have no idea like what the steps to be happy are right but then my brain sits down and is like

okay if I want to be happy I need to get financially independent I need to find a relationship and I need to take care of my physical health I need to take care of my mental health then out of the being happy in order to get become financially successful I need to get a good degree in order to get a good degree I have to go to a good college in order to go to a good college I have to study very hard in order to study very hard I have to this Tuesday I have

to study for my math test this Friday so if you look at what the the frontal lobe does and this is what we call maturity by the way it takes like this abstract goal and it breaks it down into tiny little pieces and this is how someone becomes successful in life right they take a thousand Tiny Steps in One Direction and over the course of a couple of years they end up in a good place this capacity to plan and execute tasks over time is what our frontal lobe does so I'll give you all a

simple example of this right like oh I have a party this weekend or forget about party I'm hosting D and D at my house so even then our executive function has to plan right so it has to be like okay I'm going to invite these six people I need to invite them on Monday so that I give them a day or two to figure out if they're coming on Wednesday on Wednesday I need to go to the grocery store I'm going to be doing a smoked whatever so an 8 hour I'm going to stick something

in the smoker so that we can eat really well playing with d and d with me is a lot of fun by the way if you haven't figured that out because we eat really well we're not degenerate Gamers with with Doritos and Mountain Dew it's like some weird high futin oh like tea and all this other crap it's great anyway so executive function plans the stuff and then I have to like do all the steps in time so that I can you know do something fun so this is what executive function is now the problem

is that when we use screens the executive function in our brain starts to rust because I want youall to think about whatever screen you use how much do you have to plan and execute you don't have to do crap right when I load up for a game they make it so easy for me to cue I don't have to think about which trophies I'm grinding I don't have to think about this or think about that it's all automatic they break apart all the steps for you so I even remember like when I was playing morrowwind

right so a hundred years ago back in the good old days of gaming like there's this Elder Scrolls game called Mor morwin it's Elder Scrolls 3 and one of the first quests that you get is like you need to go to suip and punabi and they give you this really complex text about how to find suip and punabi they're like leave balur from the East exit follow the river until you come to the bridge cross the bridge and on your left there's going going to be a Dry Gulch Follow The Gulch North until the second

Hill and then go right past the hill and so this is the way that games used to be there was no objective markers telling you on your mini map where you need to go so if you think about what games do what social media does you don't have to show up on social media and you're like okay today when I'm browsing Tik Tok I need to look at these 18 shorts because if I look at these 18 shorts I will check these boxes and I will progress in life no you show up you go like

this and you're like give me the content man come on son oh yeah give me that content give me that content oh yeah give me that give me that trophy give me oh just do it like figure it out for me I'm not going to think at all oh my God yeah right your frontal loes are completely shut off and this is the key thing to understand about the human organism the human brain the human body the human body doesn't wear out the human body rusts if you don't use your muscles they become flabby if

you use them more you will become stronger so the problem right now if you look at all you look at all of these apps right any kind of screen tries to take the work away from you if you watch any kind of like streaming service they even know they're like hey you just need to click we're going to tell you what to watch we're going to entice you we think you'll love this because it's SAR we're going to take all the work away from you don't have to plan anything all you have to do is

oh yeah and then oh we fig figured out that you need to autoplay we're even going to skip the credits it used to be in streaming services like You' have to watch the credits or you'd have to manually move to the next episode but these streaming services have figured out oh that's too much to [ __ ] hitting next episode is too much to ask of you we're going to do it for you right we're going to autoplay the next episode we're going to skip past the intro because we figured out you don't like watching

the intros right we're going to give you the option it's really easy to skip past the intro we're going to do things for you easier and easier and easier and easier we are going to make your front loes more and more Rusty and as we use technology like this what I've started to see is an endstage screen addiction people literally do not know how to plan their lives they can't like take an abstract issue like I need to move out of the house they don't know what the steps are and it's not that they're dumb

or anything it's that the part of their brain that takes moving out of the house and breaks it up into pieces stops working now the second thing that happens that all these screens have gotten really good at is impulse control so the whole problem with impulse control is that our brain our frontal loes normally control our impulses right so when I sit down to study my brain will be like let's not study let's use this and then the brain my brain is and then I have to control it my brain is like no no no

we're not going to give into that impulse we're going to sit down we're going to focus on studying there's impulse control I have an Impulse to stop studying and I have an Impulse to I don't feel like going to that party I have an Impulse to not go to the party so I'm going to ignore the party I'm going to just stay home it's an Impulse I have an Impulse to to stay in my bed and binge watch another episode of the show as opposed to getting out and getting out of my bed and showering

right these are all impulses that we have the impulse to stay still the impulse to cue for another game can't quit on a win Can't Stop on a loss right or can't quit on a loss Can't Stop on a win so this is what happens so we have this is our frontal loes control our impulses but now what's happening is the more we use technology they're not trying to get us to control our impulses they are Act activating impulses for us so if you look at what's happening with all technology you know they're making it

easy for you to keep watching you don't have to restrain or control yourself at all is we're going to autoplay the next video we're going to show you more bright sounds and more bright colors right now after a game there's an MVP thing and have yall ever wondered this sometimes I wonder whether everyone sees the same MVP at the end of a game which video game company out there has figured out oh like you're going to be MVP 30% of the time that's the fixed Rule and other people may see other kinds of MVPs but

why is it that mvp has to be the same person on every single match right it's kind of bizarre but this is what video game companies are doing they're figuring out how to control your impulses by making it brighter by making it faster so short form content is really good at this where they're like okay if you have an Impulse to scroll we're going to make it so easy for you to scroll bored with this no problem just just touch just a little bit just a tiny little touch a tiny little touch and we'll give

you the dopamine you don't have to restrain your impulse you don't have to make it to the end of the video ridiculous right make it to the end of the video until you unlock the next one hell no we're going to make it so easy for you to give into your impulses constantly constantly constantly and all these platforms are fighting a war where they are trying to give into your impulses more and more and more if you get bored with Tik Tok you're going to jump over to YouTube shorts if you get bored with YouTube

shorts you're going to jump over to Instagram reals so all these platforms are fighting and the key thing that's happening is the more time you spend on them the less control you have over your impulses so as you use technology for 5 years 6 years 7 years I'm seeing a decay in executive function a decay in the ability to control our impulses a decay in the ability to operationalize tasks break tasks apart split them up into their pieces which by the way requires impulse control right if I'm like planning a party I have to stop

playing games so that I can go to the grocery store those two things get really tied together so this is the other feature of endstage screen addiction and the last thing to consider is that so many of the problems that we see today these problems of lack of willpower I don't know what I want in life I'm not motivated enough I get bored easily I can't focus oh everyone has ADHD now I have social difficulties we didn't even get to that all of these problems are related to screens and what we're seeing is that people

who develop screens app develop velers platforms video game designers the way that they compete with each other is by activating more circuits of your brain there was singleplayer RPG and then we added MMOs a multiplayer component then we added progression you can play games like genin impact or ff14 and never beat the game there is constantly more agency more Mastery more Community more identity oh yeah I'm Grand Marshall of whatever I'm Gladiator you know I'm this rank I'm that rank I'm Immortal rank I'm Challenger League they're giving us all of these things to activate different

parts of our brain and so as they're activating all these kinds of things it's manifesting is so many of the problems that we see in today's world and what's going on everyone's got a lack of willpower they can't focus everyone's ADHD now and what's the one big correlation technology use has risen to 4 hours and 37 minutes per day for the average person this can go as high as 6 or 7 hours like I know y'all this is the HG community so 4 hours and 37 minutes of screen time is Amateur hour for us I

think that's cell phone use by the way so that doesn't include other screens right crazy amateur numbers over there God tier gamer like myself goated gamer of all time goated neat of all time I can I can those are rookie numbers son so if you have any of these problems chances are it correlates in some way to your screen time usage this is what I've seen clinically and we don't we don't even St studies for this stuff because like this stuff is so new we don't even think we're still debating whether video game addiction is

a real thing or not so things are moving so slow that we don't even realize this stuff so if you're struggling with these things I'd strongly strongly recommend that you listen to your instinct which is that screen use is a big part of the problem that you face and start by taking a break being in nature going for a walk every day and delay your screen time as much as possible do as much productive stuff as you can so that you reinforce the right kind of behaviors [Music]