‘I’m contemplating thinking about thinking’
-Robbie Williams, ‘Come Undone’
I want to talk about addiction. I think mine is the internet in general: my dictionary, my means of staying in touch with mates, my news and, as of late, my gym classes, are all online. There really isn’t much in my life that doesn’t have an online element to it. I think it’s fine to go online to do a certain thing (looking up a definition for ‘neuralgia,’ for example, was a recent need for the Internet), which is pretty normal.
But then, there’s mindlessly scrolling Instagram, noseying into strangers’ lives, and binging on the shitshow of American politics via Twitter, which of late has been offering live feeds of American news stations like CBS and CNN, inducing a state of morbid fascination.
And these are just a few examples.
Why do I do this?
Several reasons. Habit is one. Keeping in touch with my actual mates is another, although during lockdown I’ve hardly done that. So what else?
To understand why we hammer the internet these days, we need a little armchair knowledge of the inner workings of our own brain. Knowing your own mind, your own thought processes, is called ‘metacognition.’ ‘meta’ as in ‘of itself,’ and ‘cognition’ as in ‘to think.’
I’ve spent my fair share of time in NHS psychology departments, and I’ve spent a lot of time reading up on the endlessly fascinating field of psychology. I’m no expert, but I can dispense a little knowledge on the subject before I discuss what I realised recently.
Harvard’s helpguide explains, any source of addiction will provide ‘a shortcut to the brain’s reward system by flooding the nucleus accumbens (reward centre) with dopamine (feel-good neurotransmitter). The hippocampus (memory centre) lays down memories of this rapid sense of satisfaction, and the amygdala (primitive area of brain, responsible for detection of threat and activation of appropriate fear-related behaviours) creates a conditioned response to certain stimuli.’
Whether it’s crack cocaine, sex, heroin, MDMA, alcohol, nicotine, junk food or even exercise, the process is the same: a neural pathway is formed, meaning the brain tells us to go to a certain place for a dopamine hit. The more you visit that pathway, the more entrenched it becomes.
Social media has been providing me with that hit for a long time, so it’s pretty damn entrenched. So, how do we avoid going down that pathway?
We form other pathways. This is one of the most under-discussed and massively positive aspects to addiction treatment: we are encouraged to enjoy ourselves in other ways. We get our dopamine, not just from one other place (this would provide one other pathway with which we could then ‘swap’ our addictions) but numerous other places.
Now, during lockdown, there isn’t a lot you can go out and do. The gyms are closed. So are the bars, clubs, shops, restaurants… hence, I’ve been binging on books, home workouts, Netflix and Amazon Prime. Granted, the latter three of these are all online themselves, but beyond that, I’ve thrown myself into reading for a number of reasons. 1) I enjoy it, 2) it stops me, as mentioned above, from pissing my day away on Twitter, 3) it has made me very knowledgable and eloquent, 4) it gives me blog content.
Hence, to get out of that bad habit, replace it with not just one other thing, but a host of other fun things to give yourself numerous dopamine hits. This erodes the power of the original addiction, without giving you a new one in its place.
