Dr. Anna Lembke

reinforcing because of their dynamic design features that they create the illusion of connection even when there's no real connection happening.

And more importantly, they hijack our reward system so that we don't want to disengage even when we've exhausted their utility, right?

So these digital media are great when we use them as a tool, not great when we use them as a drug to change the way we feel.

We evolved to reflexively approach pleasure and avoid pain.

Gotcha.

In a world of scarcity.

Okay.

Where we would have to do a lot of upfront work for a tiny little bit of reward.

Yes.

And again, that is a great built-in mechanism to keep us alive in a world of scarcity.

But in this world of overwhelming overabundance,

It's a very bad mechanism because now we're exposing our brains to this fire hose of dopamine.

We're getting into this dopamine deficit state.

Now we've narrowed our focus.

All we want to do is keep pursuing pleasure to bring ourselves back up to baseline.

And the prospect of getting up off the couch and actually going out the door, much less going to the gym, has become kind of a Mount Everest for us, right?

Because we've reset our hedonic or joy set point.

Plus...

We are embedded in a culture that tells us that pain is dangerous, that if we're uncomfortable, then we're potentially creating a psychic scar that's going to set us up for future pain in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder, that what we need is to pursue comfort, to be happy, to be relaxed, that any kind of distress is actually going to harm our brains.

And in fact, the opposite is true.