Too Much Stimulation Messes With Your Dopamine
When you repeatedly engage in something you enjoy (including social media apps), “your threshold for enjoyment goes up and up and up,” Huberman says.
Visiting Facebook or Instagram several times a day means encountering hundreds of posts with photos and messages. Your baseline dopamine prior to using social media was likely lower than it is now, with the incorporation of social media into our lives. You may see a post that gives you a high dopamine hit, but subsequent posts that might have given you similar dopamine hits had you seen them for the first time now offer a weaker feeling of contentment.
In other words: the more visually and emotionally stimulated we are, the less pleasure we get from visual and emotional stimulation.
How To Help Yourself Quit Social Media
We can’t completely get away from social media, and you may not even be interested in deleting the apps because you’d like to check in on them every so often. But Huberman says one thing you can do is begin replacing the dopamine hits you get from negative sources in your life with positive sources.
Things like chocolate will increase your dopamine 1.5 times above your baseline, sex has been shown to increase dopamine 2 times, and nicotine that is smoked can increase it 2.5 times about baseline, but it’s a short-lived dopamine hit that needs to be repeated. A more positive dopamine hit can include exercise like running, which can increase your levels of dopamine 2 times above baseline.
As we engage with something more and more and talk about it or find enjoyment and appreciation in it, the amount of dopamine that behavior evokes tends to go up, Huberman says. For example, saying you “hate” exercise versus saying you “like” it can make a difference in the dopamine levels it achieves. But he cautions that any time you engage in an activity that increases dopamine significantly, this lowers your baseline of dopamine, meaning it will require more to reach that same level of contentment and euphoria next time you seek it.
Although social media has its place in our society and isn’t going away anytime soon, acknowledging it as a potential source of dopamine dysregulation can help you seek more positive and time-worthy ways of achieving similar, and more long-lasting and productive, dopamine hits.