5 Min
Admit it: Email and text messages turn you on. They are as addictive as any other physical drug of choice.
Don’t believe it? Just try to keep reading this brief article without succumbing to the urge to click away and check your inbox or other notifications. I dare you.
I double-dog dare you…
If you’re still up for the challenge, let’s continue…
Surprisingly, we humans are a lot like laboratory mice, rats and monkeys.
While our brains may be bigger and more “advanced,” they operate much the same when it comes to seeking pleasure.
We have decades of research—perhaps dating back to B.F. Skinner’s landmark operant conditioning research—that reveals how lab animals essentially get hooked on random stimuli that lead to rewards, like food pellets. Or avoiding nasty shocks.
Lab animals undergoing this type of conditioning will do just about anything to keep the “hits” coming. And they are hard-wired not only to seek and enjoy pleasure when it comes..but to feel good just anticipating the possibility of a reward. Their brains release lots of feel-good chemicals, namely dopamine, that keep them continually on the hunt for the next ‘fix.’
And in case you haven’t heard: Our brains do the same thing.
Anything that we get or think we will get potential pleasure from—whether it’s Coca-Cola, cocaine or a new connection request in email—triggers a dopamine release and with it a temporary “high” of sorts.
Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, has compared dopamine levels in monkeys and humans. He explained that in both, "Dopamine is not about pleasure, it's about the anticipation of pleasure. It's about the pursuit of happiness." Unlike monkeys, however, he says humans "keep those dopamine levels up for decades and decades waiting for the reward." (Source: The Mind Voyager).
David Hirschman, the managing editor of Big Think, says that “Addictive drugs flood the brain with dopamine and condition us to expect artificially high levels of the neurotransmitter. Over time, the user's brain requires more dopamine than it can naturally produce, and it becomes dependent on the drug, which never actually satisfies the need it has created.”
While you may argue that an ingestible drug like ecstasy must be worse in terms of your “craving” it vs. something intangible like emails…in fact, the brain treats them in much the same way.
That’s why digital communications have increasingly turned many of us into zombies, as the tools have proliferated and the amount of information we have to wade through has exploded.
We now have lots of shiny buttons and screens to push…and it’s really, really hard not to.
You don’t have to be diagnosed with full-fledged Internet Addiction Disorder to recognize the borderline obsessive symptoms of constantly checking all your digital checkpoints.
Our primary forms of personal communication—emails, phone calls and text messages—are ubiquitous and cheap access points. They ironically have made it easier for us to adopt troublesome habits. Even worse, they have led to growing feelings of anxiety, insecurity and inferiority.
Yet despite the stats and the warnings about what technology is doing to our lives, few people are able to tame the beast themselves.
At OkClear, this is something we’re obsessed about. We’re figuring out ways to give people more control over their lives, by making technology less of an enabler.
Our team is tired of the “online overwhelm,” and we set out to build new tools to stop unwanted stimuli, create more free space in our days and mitigate the need for constant button-pushing for us to work efficiently.
If you want to find out how we’re trying to get better results from our digital communications (and hopefully re-wire our brains in the process), sign up for product updates and announcements.
