How to trick your brain to do difficult things? Mobile addiction

 

5 hours and 27 minutes is a time that an average person usually spends on a mobile device.  Millennials i.e. youngsters spend an average of 5 hours and 42 minutes a day. 

So if you are an average person them you spend almost 19710 hours of your lifetime on the mobile phone. This makes a total of 821 days and in any field if we have to become the best we need to spend 10000 hours on it.

So if we need to become like any popular singer or a popular businessman then we need to spend this amount of time on it.

So if we invest only 4 hours daily on any of our skills for 7 years then we have spent 4 x 365 x 7 = 10220 hours.

If we spend 4 hours on any of our skills to make it happen then have given 7300 hours on that skill and people besides us will come to know that now we are above average and are about to reach masters level.

Now if we are spending this large time on a mobile device then if we spend the same time on our skill then we can become the best of best.

But hard to know many of us to spend most of our time on Facebook, Instagram, texting, YouTube, and Twitter.

The founder of SpaceX and TESLA Elon Musk says that we become sad using some of the social media sites. The problem on a few social media sites is people post things that do not belong to their real-life and other people who see it don’t believe and regret it comparing their life with the post.

People regret seeing other people's post and their lifestyles which is not really as much use filters for uploading their posts on social media. 

This makes people think as if they are a loser, and for real people posting their content on social media might not be happy too.

Elon musk says “Happiness = Reality - Expectations”, this is because all are common people but what happens is our expectations start to increase when we start to compare ourselves with others. 

This makes us feel sad more; in short social media applications and their notifications are not only making us nervous but also increasing anxiety, stress, and depression. 

This is making us lose our patience, and no one wants to be social even when we are sitting with someone all are using their phones.

Why are we not able to get rid of these applications?

In social media applications the best behavior Psychologist in the world work on it who knows which application can be made more addictive. 

They use a lot of tricks and the most important trick is about human behavior i.e. significance – importance. In simple words, every person wants a feeling of importance and this feeling is as important as food.

Do you know why maximum people have one particular subject as a favorite, is this because our brain was made for it; no this is because in our childhood we had got importance in this subject.  

For example when we used to give daily one hour for one subject (say - math) and we were appreciated for that subject by our parents or teachers. We become happy and started to give 2 hours daily only for that one subject (say - math).

Now as compared to the other classmates we have already been given more time in that one subject math so our teacher started to praise us and we started to get importance in this one subject math.

This is a reason everyone wants importance in any such field like one would like to have importance dressing style, some bypassing government exam, some want importance by helping people.

This is one of the reasons why social media gives us an opportunity of getting importance through likes and comments.

The real reason behind this is when we like someone’s post, we didn’t like the content actually, and this is known to us to all and also to the platform creators.

But when we all are getting importance in social media likes and comments, why do we all have to get the importance by doing some large work?

 

What is the Solution? – The DOPAMINE DETOX (Dopamine fasting)

Dopamine is a chemical or a neurotransmitter that is released in our brain when we do something which is more interesting rather than a more difficult task.

Having a dopamine kick from social media is a problem as it converts this into dopamine anticipation in the form of someone like your profile picture. So the user gets happy and would like to check such types of important notifications from time to time. 

When this gets repeated our brain gets trained for notifications happiness even when one starts to hear the noise of notification.

Dopamine detox is a simple method to use which says at a particular time of the day one would not get involved in fun activity no phone, music listening, or another useless hobby.

This will start to make less the dopamine threshold value and boring things will also start to make you happy and also has no side effects.

So to make a start it should be started as soon as possible for 1 to 2 hours daily and increase the speed.

The simple solution to this is to close or turn off the internet for 2 straight hours while doing your routine task or work as one needs a short break after 2 straight hours.

To have a check or track we need to track the timer to improve and also many applications are available on the Google Store to get help.

Some of the applications are “Your Hour”, “Screen time”, “My Phone Time”, etc. which can give your feedback.

 

What’s the takeaway?

On average, a person spends 5 to 5:15 hours on social media in a day which means in 10 years 19710 hours i.e. 821 days i.e. 2.3 years.

This is a very large number because at this time from a zero level in a particular field one can be the best of best.

Elon musk assumes that social media is one of the reasons for depression and anxiety as our reality is compared with people’s fake life and getting sad; while people who are posting this might be unhappy.

Every notification on social media releases dopamine and when we are trained only notification noise makes us happy.

In Dopamine detox, for some time we need to stay away from every fun activity for some time period in a day and need to only focus on our work. This will make you bored and our brain will start to accept boring activities as well like studying or continuing work.

One can get more knowledge when deciding for reading books instead of using precious time on social media.