Struggling with Addiction and Motivation
Addiction is a nasty little habit that always stalks us and haunts from the dark corners of our life. And no matter what the addiction is, it is always a horrible feeling when deep down you know that you don't want to be addicted to whatever it is that you are addicted to. Granted that some addictions are far worse than others, but in truth, no addiction is a good addiction.
I imagine that the one addiction that almost all Americans face is the addiction to social media. And I am no different. After coming to Mexico, my wife would say to me quite a bit, you're always on your phone, or you sure love Facebook don't you? And in true junkie fashion, I would try to justify why I was using my drug of choice, social media. I would tell her, the reason that I am on social media so often is that everyone I know such as family and friends are all back in the US, and social media is how I stay in touch with them. But come on! You know good well that wasn't the reason why I was checking my cell phone every 10 to 15 minutes. And even if I didn't have any notifications from Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, I would still open up the apps to make sure I didn't have any, or to make sure I wasn't missing something. Do you want to know the truth? About 95% of the time, I wasn't missing anything at all. No big news or anything. Nothing that would drastically change my life had I not known about it.
I don't know much about dopamine and serotonin, but Dr. Robert Lustig talks about it much more eloquently than I ever could. So, here is an excerpt from his website:
"Dopamine is the “reward” neurotransmitter that tells our brains we want more; yet every substance or behavior that releases dopamine in the extreme leads to addiction. Serotonin is the “contentment” neurotransmitter that tells our brains we don’t need any more; yet its deficiency leads to depression. Ideally, both are in optimal supply. Yet dopamine evolved to overwhelm serotonin—because our ancestors were more likely to survive if they were constantly motivated—with the result that constant desire can chemically destroy our ability to feel happiness, while sending us down the slippery slope to addiction."
Our brains receive a hit of dopamine every time we check our social media, and the problem that this creates is that when we have work to do, the work is never as satisfying or as rewarding to our brains as it is when it is checking social media. Therefore, because it isn't as satisfying, and it isn't receiving any dopamine, therefore checking social media constantly makes it that much more difficult to get any real work done.
I knew very well in the past that social media is addictive, and in the past I have deleted all social media apps from my phone, but eventually I would download the apps back onto my phone. Well, here I am once again, deleting my social media apps off of my phone, in order to build some motivation to get some work done in my life. Here I am supposed to be getting some overdue homework done, and I came to my wits' end. I realized that I was checking my cell phone all the time. Well, no more! Of course I can still check all my social media on my laptop, but that is going to require a little more effort on my part. Also, I don't carry my laptop with me everywhere I go like my phone. More than likely, I am only going to check my social media once or twice a day on my laptop, and I think that that should suffice.
I think that it is time to get some work done. How about it? Let's do this!
Reference:
Also check out Dr. Robert Lustig's interview on The David Pakman Show:
