Ever since the pandemic my attachment to screens and media has slowly crept up on me, and I suspect that’s the case for many of us. It hit me when I started panicked after leaving my flat without headphones, thinking “how could I ever walk around with just my thoughts?” I decided to significantly reduce my technology usage and I keep getting the sense that I’m experiencing some kind of withdrawal from the constant media and dopamine hits, but I was curious just what’s going on, and how bad it is.
What does dopamine actually do and is “dopamine addiction” scientifically accurate?
Many of us have some kind of association between dopamine and pleasure, but this is a bit of an over-simplification. Dopamine neurons actually fire when rewards are unexpected, or when an outcome exceeds the brain’s prediction, rather than simply when rewards are delivered. This means when you post something in Instagram and you get more engagement than expected, that’s when you feel that dopamine rush. Dopamine is more related to the feeling of wanting rather than enjoying, it facilitates reinforcement learning in our own brains through a reward prediction error, termed RPE by Schultz in 1997. This aligns with the idea that anticipation and consumption of media involve different anatomical pathways, as seen in fMRI’s of subjects who are listening to music. Dopamine is linked to these anticipation pathways. For those of you who, like me, think about things in a machine learning context (which derives its so much theory from the brain), this RPE is similar to the error that you try to minimise in reinforcement learning, or pretty much any type of machine learning method for that matter. Or more accurately in this case, you’re trying to maximise that reward in the form of dopamine.
But I need to make a clear distinction, “dopamine addiction” is not accurate. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that your brain naturally produces. It can contribute to addictions, but it’s your brain is not fundamentally addicted to dopamine, but rather to the stimuli in the form of behaviours or substances that trigger its release. It is a reward system dysregulation, and various other neurotransmitters like glutamate, GABA, and opioids are also involved in this process.
How do our brains actually respond to social media, music, and constant digital stimulation?
Social media and entertainment as a whole has kind of “hacked” this evolutionary reward learning mechanism by reflecting the process of reward maximisation. A study by Lindström et al. in 2021 investigates this, using reinforcement learning to analyse the social media posts. They found that users spaced their posts to maximise average rate of accrued social rewards. The reward feels good, so we change our behaviour to get more of it.
But what are the effects of being stuck in this chase for reward maximisation? Studies have shown frequent social media use is tied to increased sensitivity to social feedback over time. Your brain becomes hypersensitized to those little notifications and likes, making you crave checking even more frequently. It’s a reinforcing cycle: the more you check, the more your brain adapts to expect that feedback, driving you to check over and over again.
Various imaging studies confirm that long term use is quite literally changing your brain. The cognitive control system shows reduced efficiency in the context of a less activated prefrontal cortex and altered DMN connectivity. Other regions affected include the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortex. Unsurprisingly, these changes manifest in our mental health as well. Some studies show that media multitaskers have been found to be more susceptible to distractions and are worse at task switching despite all their practice. There’s an overall lack of cognitive control associated with prolonged use of media.
I’m not going to lie, the hardest part of writing this article has been choosing which examples to show you, there’s a seemingly endless body of literature about the negative effects of just social media, and that doesn’t even take into account overall screen time and other forms of entertainment. There’s everything from computational models that mimic social media reward behaviour to neuroimaging showing consistent activation of regions of the brain related to dopamine, to longitudinal studies linking habitual media use to neural development changes.
I can’t put everything in here, but if this topic interests you I strongly encourage you to look into it on your own. The more you see, the scarier it gets. It’s not just about wasting time online, by letting this reward dysfunction go unchecked, you’re having a long-lasting and potentially harmful effect on your brain.
Is there hope?
Thankfully, yes, a bit. The hard part, as with any addiction, is breaking the cycle. You could argue this may be even more difficult to do as it’s so societally acceptable to be on our screens. The times I “relapse” are usually when I am replying to friends on social media and got sucked back in, usually by some funny possum or meerkat videos (the algorithm knows me well). But there is certainly hope for the depleted dopamine receptors.
To put things in perspective, the figure below shows PET scans of dopamine D₂ receptors from a study on cocaine users, comparing healthy controls with individuals one and four months after abstinence. I’m highlighting cocaine because it can be difficult to establish a baseline with social media usage. Unless you’re going full Thoreau, it is impractical and impossible for most people to fully cut themselves off from digital stimulation. Whereas a coke addict does have the ability to fully stop consuming cocaine. As you can see, the receptor availability begins to recover with time, slowly, but measurably in substance-use studies. I’m not saying a dopamine addiction and cocaine addiction are anywhere close to the same, but this figure implies that brain’s reward circuitry can recover. Given time and reduced overstimulation, those same pathways that adapt to excess can also adapt back toward balance.
I don’t know if I want to face how much I’ve personally fried my dopamine receptors, but studies like this show that they recover, oftentimes quite slowly, over time. Now you don’t need to become a luddite, but I would strongly recommend giving your dopamine receptors a break every now and then. So often when we think of a relaxing, chill day, we think of playing video games, watching TV, scrolling on our phones… But these activities, though seemingly relaxing, may be doing us more harm in the long run. Log off, read a book, take a walk in nature with no distractions. Or go on your phone, just keep in mind the chemical effect you’re creating in your brain when you do it.
