Why your phone is making you sad

just 15 years ago only 20 percent of people access the internet from their phone now it's up to 91 percent 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 percent 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's 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 motivating 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 nigrostriato pathways these become activated when anticipating and experiencing rewards and the thing is that every time you get a notification laugh at a funny Tick Tock 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 be specific Pathways in our brain therefore these Pathways in our brain are getting stronger we now watch hundreds of pieces of content on

Tick Tock in a few minutes you scroll through Twitter seeing memes images jokes at record speed or you interact with large group of friends in group chats or on Instagram DMS all of those things are releasing dopamine in 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 been 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 pre-treated 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 anhedonia 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 percent more likely to develop risk factors for suicide compared to those who only use their devices for an hour increased Tick-Tock use has been linked to increased upward social comparison which is comparing yourself off 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 Tick Tock 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 number one do you have cravings do you want to look at your phone at the expense of other Act activities such as talking to your partner talking

to your kids talking to a barista working out or interacting with friends salience does your phone impact your mood 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 okay so I guess I might be addicted to my 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 neural 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 withdrawal 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 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 this hormone can make you feel stressed 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 in

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 also relate to this one 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 so this is a long process 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 chronological binding 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 sign says your brain can re-adapt and gain better control this way physical binding if you think that there are certain trigger apps such as Instagram or Tick Tock that you want to not use for a month you log out and give your password to a friend 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 9pm 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 deviceless meals categorical binding trying to make your phone mean less to you one easy thing to do is to put it on grayscale 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 a lot of This research is flooding in now because people are really concerned if you are finding that your phone is having a negative impact on your life just know you aren't alone and study those three steps and choose which ones are best for you leave a comment below about what's working for you what's not this is a discussion that I think we all need to continue

to have and help each other out now if you want more information about how your phone is actually changing your body we made a podcast about how it could be causing us to hunch it could be making us nearsighted these are all just insane impact that these things that we are all obsessed with and so recently have come into our lives have affected our brains and our bodies thank you for watching this is obviously a journey that I'm still on I've made lots of videos about this leave comments below for any tips you have I

will be reading them because I also am trying to decrease my phone use and honestly good luck it's hard until like the government or someone actually regulates these phones and social media apps I think it's up to us to understand the science to regulate it ourselves