Dr. Arthur Brooks explains how smartphones hijack your brain through dopamine. The average person checks their phone 205 times a day, and apps use intermittent rewards to keep you hooked. Heavy use correlates with anxiety and depression, likely in a feedback loop.
205 times per day.
When you first got your cell phone, you didn't check it all that often. When you first got your smartphone, you checked it a lot more. It was more addictive. It gave you more dopamine. Now, today, the average person checks their phone 205 times a day. That's just all they long. Why? Because you think about it, something crosses your mind. A little bit of dopamine says, go look at your phone. Now, if you look at your phone, there's nothing on it. Like, nobody texted me, nobody emailed me, whatever. There's no notifications on my social media. It's kind of like, that's a bummer. That's because your dopamine did. If there's more there than you thought, then you get a bump again. And it trains you, it trains your brain. And then you get more apps. There's more possibility that you're going to get the stimulus. And that's how escalation works. There's a lot of research out there. What they find is a comorbidity between clinical depression, anxiety, and inappropriately heavy use of smartphones. Now, why is it. Is it because depressed people use their smartphones more? Or inappropriate smartphone use, Overuse of smartphones leads to depression, anxiety? Probably yes, because this is always a cycle of dependence. The drugs lead to depression, the depression leads to the drugs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all the way down.
