11th July 2023, Mumbai: Are you on a digital drug? Let’s answer this. If you experience a mild state of panic, for not watching your phone,t.v, social media, video games, then yes you are on a digital drug. Reason being every time we consume social media our brain releases a chemical called Dopamine, a happy hormone. It is responsible for allowing us to feel pleasure, satisfaction, and motivation. But the problem is Dopamine boost is temporary and leads to letdown which can negatively affect our impulse control.
Prolong use of gadgets acts like a digital drug for our brains. We experience less pleasure when not using our gadgets because we use a lot of Dopamine at once and we enter a state of Dopamine deficit that is a state of anxiety and stress. Let’s counter this. Firstly we need to understand that social media is basically a way to drugify human connections.
We can always bring some changes. A good way tostart is to turn off notifications on your phone, set passwords for all the applications so that you need to type them each time you open your phone, keep it on sleep mode at night, and set screen timings. After all, we humans have evolved over millions of years to want to connect with people. Just imagine how different would be our life be if we just had text and video calls. Article Written by Ms. Ramnik Kaur
