The addiction we don’t talk about.

We talk about alcohol, smoking and drugs addiction in our everyday life but in this blog I would like to talk about social media and why it’s addictive.

Let me start of by explaining the science behind social media, you see every time scroll through Instagram or get a friend request in Facebook or a new snap and every time you get a text, like or a comment in your post you feel good because of the release of dopamine and that’s why you keep going back to these apps and dopamine is the exact chemical released when we drink, smoke or gamble in other words it’s highly highly addictive.

You see there’s age restriction on smoking, gambling and alcohol but no age restrictions on social media and cell phones, before you judge me on why I am speaking like a boomer let me tell you this those who went on to become smoking addicts or alcohol addicts in there 20s or 30s were introduced to smoking or alcohol when they were teenagers and guess who were introduced social media when they teenagers, us, the people born after 2000s.

So to the main part when we go through adolescence we go through a stressful and anxious part of our lives and we are supposed to learn to cope up with stress and anxiety by talking with our friends or family, but quite by accident people discover the numbing effects of dopamine and use that to cope with stress and anxiety and this becomes hard-wired in their brain and every time they suffer from anxiety or stress they will not seek a person they will turn to the bottle.

This is the same scenario with social media and dopamine triggering device and when this gets hard-wired into our brain every time we suffer from stress or anxiety we don’t seek a person and instead we go to social media or devices.

In conclusion in no way am saying social media is bad for you, too much social media is too an extent you constantly use it to escape reality.

PS : If you find you have heard this before this was inspired from Simon Sinek’s podcast in Tom Bilyeu’s show.