Dopamine and Smartphones

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The good deal of glee we experience when we are presented with the most desired gift, the high we feel when the yum-yum cheeseburger is in front of our us, the joy of getting overwhelming likes for the new post on Facebook. These experiences lift us to a heightened state. The one great being behind all these pleasures is a chemical called Dopamine. To put it simple, dopamine is a neurotransmitter produced by neurons. That is, it transmits signals between different nerve cells. It is linked with a wide array of neurological functions like mood, learning, motivation, attention, sleep, punishment and many more. Whenever we experience success, appraisal, tasty food we are rewarded with a spike of dopamine. The release of dopamine, provides enough motivation to repeat the action.

The dopamine is usually fortold as pleasure hormone, but it's major role is to stimulate the brain to repeat the action and also fosters many other psychological functions. Whenever we receive a reward, the dopamine neurons get activated and gives the enough pleasure to repeat the action. So this system is called dopamine induced feedback loop. The dopamine neurons offer response to addictive drugs suchlike heroin, cocaine, alcohols, etc.But in this case it produces an intense rise in dopamine than before to deliver immense pleasure. It results in an insatiable hunger for pleasure, which eventually results in addiction.

Image source: pixabay.com

Correspondingly, we experience a hike in dopamine when we encounter positive social interactions like having a new friendship, performance appraisal, good morning wish from a friend and so on. The similar environment is created virtually in our smartphones. The natural phenomenon of the dopamine system is exploited for business purpose. All the social media platforms make use of dopamine spike to gather new users. Each and every notification of the smartphone results in dopamine influx. Smartphone addiction is no way less than drug addiction. The extreme amount of dopamine bumps happens in these two actions. The smartphone provides a virtual environment to interact with people, favored with higher concentration of information, the more we explore, the more pleasure we endure. In short, it swamps us with likes, comments, online friends and design tactics in a way to hold our attention. It boosts us with happiness, confidence and eagerness. To be frank, it made us suffer with happiness. The pleasure we experience doesn't last forever, whenever we don't get enough likes, no response for stories or ignorance of the message, we feel numb, an utmost emptiness, a complete vacuum occupies our entire mind. The higher we fly, the harder we fall. Then the other day we face copious likes and attention, then again we start to fly high as before, all the numbness get wiped off. But now our brain gets accustomed to this pleasure, to satisfy it, we need more rush of dopamine. So to satiate the brain we use the social media a little more, than before. This finally results in addiction. This is how we hastily addicted to smartphones.

By using a smartphone, we are falling preys to line someone's pocket. Never ever tie one's own happiness to these inanimate devices. Many social media are not entirely necessary for us. To minimize the usage, try using apps that have unavoidable utility or any professional reason. If any media you using couldn't make you a better person, then there is no use in carrying it all along. It depends on us, to fall again or to stand apart.