Brianna Gomez

It causes you trouble.

It distracts you from the things that actually matter in life.

So we do things in our daily routine that some of us are quite aware are bad for us, and then we repeat it daily.

Every single day, 99% of us check social media.

Every single day, 99% of us are on our phones for longer than we worked that day, for longer than we slept for some of us.

you know that's not good for you, why can't you stop?

It's a stress response and that feels unpleasant, so your phone's initial reaction is to check it, to make the stress go away.

But what actually happens when we check it

is that it takes us down the rabbit hole that never ends.

And chronically elevated cortisol can weaken our attention span, willpower and self-restraint, hurt our processing speeds, eye-hand coordination, the ability to plan and execute tasks, negatively affect emotional regulation, learning and retention, and visual and verbal memory.

How fun is that?

So not only does having our phones nearby trigger our cortisol, our stress hormone, it also plays into our dopamine, which that is what creates that pleasure and pain response, which makes the phones so addictive.

It's almost like it hurts, but it feels good.

And that's how

Anything toxic goes in life.

If you've been in a toxic relationship, toxic friendship, drug, alcohol use, that is literally how it goes.

Alcohol, it tastes terrible.

But people do it anyway, and so many people are addicted to it.

Toxic relationships, you know they are bad for you.

The fights, the abuse, whatever it may be, you know it's bad.