How Do Phones Become Addicting?
You’re gonna spend 2 full months of the year 2024 looking at your phone. Phone addiction is 100% real and it messes with your brain the same way that cocaine does.
These phones, they really sneak up on ya. It’s almost as if smartphones and social media have been intentionally designed to be this way. And it’s almost as if the people making the apps know their product is harmful but don’t do anything about it–which these leaks provide is true.
Phones and social media are addictive by weaponizing your brain against you. It takes our brain’s very necessary need for dopamine and twists it to make money for Mark Zuckerberg.
The more interactions you experience on social media, the more dopamine you get–this is the dopamine loop. Perform action, get rewarded with dopamine, and so do action again and get dopamine.
Methods to Reduce Screen Time
Okay, so you want to reduce your screen time and are looking for methods to help with that.
Dopamine detoxes are a great idea. This is where people attempt to rebalance their brain’s dopamine (reward) delivery system by eliminating as many stimulating and/or pleasurable experiences as possible. This would include giving up television, social media, online content in general, video games, and sometimes this can include dietary restrictions like going on a sugar fast.
Of course, your brain will still make dopamine, but the idea of the fast is to rebalance your relationship with it.
And you know I’m going to mention Chinchillers in here because this is the exact reason why I created it. I built Chinchillers as a baby step for people to take in changing their screen habits and building a healthier relationship with their phone.
The habit we have built into our lives is that we pick up the phone to check social media. This is so hard to break.
So the way that some people have been using Chinchillers is as a substitute for that habit. It’s a first step.
Instead of picking up the phone to check social media, you can just go to the Chinchillers app and start CHILLING.
This is a new habit that you’re building that gives you a good way out of your old way of doing things. It’s a way to start thinking about your screen time and social media usage and start to reevaluate what you’re doing.