Why It’s so Hard to Quit Social Media

We’ve all been there…

One minute you’re sitting back in bed scrolling on your phone, and the next thing you know, three hours have gone by and you haven’t even realised.

Worse still, you haven’t moved a muscle apart from your thumb, your eyes are stinging from the glare of the screen, and most worryingly, you can’t remember a single video that you’ve spent the last three hours watching, because in that space of time, you’ve watched hundreds.

So, you try and tell yourself that you’re going to set limits, half an hour every day on social media, no more.

But when your screen time reminder pops up, all it takes is one click to bat it away, and you’re free to keep scrolling until you can’t keep your head upright any longer, a depressing cycle that just repeats itself over and over again.

But why is it so hard to stop ourselves from spending an inordinate amount of time on social media? The answer actually lies not wholly in the fault of the consumer, but in the developers of the apps themselves.

It’s all down to dopamine. Dopamine plays a role in the regulation of many functions, movement, memory, attention, and much more.

Dopamine is also called the ‘Feel Good’ hormone, as when it’s released you feel a sense of happiness and pleasure.

This happens as part of a system that has been hard wired in our brains since the days of cavemen, as the release of dopamine is designed to reward you when you do the things necessary to survive.

Social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and TikTok are all designed to be as engaging as possible to keep you on the apps for as long as they can.

Posting pictures and receiving comments of praise, and being shown all kinds of quick, snappy engaging content leads to massive rushes of dopamine.

According to Anna Lembke in her book Dopamine Nation, in order to compensate for the mass amount of dopamine that’s released, the brain responds by decreasing dopamine transmission to below the baseline, which is why you feel that crash of glumness once you stop scrolling.

Repeated use of social media then creates a dopamine-deficit state, wherein we’re less able to experience pleasure unless we’re on our phones.

This dependency on social media for our happiness is a massive problem, and has been linked to the uptick in issues such as anxiety and depression, especially amongst younger people.

In her book, Lembke also puts forward a solution to breaking our addiction. In order to properly reset your dopamine reward pathways, realistically you need to stay off social media for a month.

But if this is too big of a challenge to take on straight away, start with one day of no social media.

This might be difficult for some, but if you’re able to do it, it’s a massive step in the right direction.