What Your Phone Is Doing to Your Brain
Neuroscientist Emily McDonald explains how smartphones rewire your brain through dopamine spikes that lower your baseline motivation and energy. Heavy screen time shrinks working memory, weakens emotional control, and night-time use disrupts sleep and memory. She offers concrete fixes: limit morning and bedtime phone use, mute feeds, practice boredom, and spend time outside.
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If you've ever felt like you know exactly what you should be doing, but you're just not motivated to do it. If you feel like your attention span is shrinking or like you're always distracted, maybe you feel like you compare yourself all the time, or you don't really know who you really are, what you really want in life. It might not be a you problem. It might be a dopamine problem, and it might be because of the phone. In this video, I'm going to show you exactly what your phone does to your brain and give you my favorite science-backed tips to fix it. And if you're new here, hi, I'm Emily McDonald. I'm a neuroscientist by training. I've got many years of research experience in the lab as well as two degrees in neuroscience, and I am now a coach to people in over 55 countries all over the world. I help them rewire their brain, reprogram their subconscious mind, and manifest the life that they dream of. And I also create content on here to help you rewire your brain and do the exact same thing. So without further ado, let's just get straight into it. So the truth is that the phone and social media is absolutely changing your brain. Now, there are nuanced findings here in the research field, and the level to which your phone usage affects you and your brain, it does correlate with how much you use it, right? So social media isn't just evil inherently. It's not bad inherently. It depends on how much you use it and how often you are on there. So everything that I'm about to break down and how it impacts the brain absolutely depends on how much you use it. If you are checking it like once a day, it's not going to have the same impact on you as if you are checking it as soon as you wake up in the morning, or scrolling before you fall asleep, or on there constantly all day long. And I'm about to tell you the neuroscience behind why. This impacts you so much. So the way that social media works actually is a lot like the way casinos work. Every single time you open up social media, something called a variable reward happens. Every time you refresh your feed, you're not sure what's gonna pop up. You're not sure whether it's gonna be something you love, something that's gonna make you happy, whether it's something that's gonna make you smile and laugh, or something that is gonna make you go, oh, it's doomsday. We— you just don't know. And this is called a variable reward. The same thing works at the casinos, right? You don't know whether you're going to hit the jackpot or whether you're going to lose all your money. Now the thing is, is that variable rewards cause a lot of anticipation, and it is that anticipation of a reward that drives compulsive behavior, addictive behavior. And so this is why social media can be so addicting for many people, is because of this variable reward. Like, you're not sure what you're going to get. You don't know what to expect. And that makes people have this kind of compulsive behavior. Now, I also want to make the analogy here to relationships. This is also a lot of the time why people get hooked on people that aren't necessarily consistent. This is why we— a lot of people fall into cycles and traps of people maybe like love bombing and then pulling away, or, you know, hitting you up every once in a while and keeping you on your toes and not being consistent and showing up. But I digress. This is a video about the phones. So that is how we get addicted to social media. But let's talk about how it impacts us after a given amount of time. So every single time we go on social media, we get this little dopamine hit or a little spike, right? And this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Like dopamine spikes alone are not necessarily a bad thing. What happens is when we are constantly giving ourselves little dopamine spikes. Dopamine is really, really important for motivation and taking action towards your goals. It's really important for making you feel excited about life, okay? But what you need in order to feel motivated and excited about life is to have a healthy dopamine baseline, all right? We've got two different types of dopamine activity I'm talking about here. One is dopamine spikes, right? This happens when you check social media. It also happens when you eat some ice cream. It's not just social media, but this— these happen when we experience something very rewarding, right? And then you've got a dopamine baseline. This is tonic dopamine. Dopamine spikes are phasic spikes. Tonic dopamine is this dopamine baseline. Now, a healthy baseline is really representative of a healthy amount of baseline motivation, baseline energy, baseline hope, excitement, optimism for your life. Now, what happens when we are constantly giving ourselves these little spikes? What happens is our dopamine baseline, the difference between spike and baseline, this isn't so different anymore. What happens over time is that our dopamine baseline starts to lower and decrease, and now you don't feel motivated and excited and energized about your life. And there is one more piece of the puzzle here when it comes to dopamine that is so important to realize. The brain motivates us toward our goals based on what it thinks is worth it. It's always asking a question like, is this going to be worth it? Is all this work gonna be worth it? If you've ever pulled up to a coffee shop or pulled up to work or wherever and you just sit in your car or the gym working up the courage to go in, what you're doing is actually trying to prove to your brain that the work is going to be worth it. I have a whole bunch of dopamine hacks for this, how to overcome this hump, and I can do another video on that if you want. Let me know in the comments if you want video about overcoming this dopamine hump. But the reason this happens is because your brain isn't sure whether the work is going to be worth the reward. Now, what happens when you are constantly checking social media, you're constantly giving yourself cheap dopamine hits, is that you are actually teaching your brain that reward costs nothing, that reward costs no effort. Like, your brain learns dopamine's cheap. I don't need to put in any work to get dopamine. And now you've got big goals and dreams, but what happens? Your brain's like, mm, why would I wanna put in all this effort? Why would I put in all this work when I could just go get dopamine for cheap over here? Think about it from a money perspective. Like, why would I spend $100 on the same exact shirt that I could go get over here for $10? I'm gonna go spend the $10 to get the same shirt. Why would I spend $100 on it? Now the thing is that our brain doesn't take into account is that the more expensive thing is going to be the more fulfilling thing in the long run. Doing the hard work and doing the thing that isn't cheap dopamine, like working on a project and working hard on something that maybe you don't get the reward at first. Like for this gym example of like sitting outside the gym, you might not feel the reward at first, you might not see the results at first, but 6 months from now it's going to be so fulfilling. You're going to have boosted your confidence, you're going to have boosted your belief in yourself, and you are going to feel so proud of yourself, right? And maybe even fulfilled depending on whatever the project is that you're working on. Social media doesn't give you that. Cheap dopamine doesn't give you that. It gives you cheap dopamine, but it leaves you empty. It's like a cheap snack. I actually heard the analogy made once of, um, social media is like the junk food for your brain, and it absolutely is. It's a little sugar high, and then you crash, and then guess what happens? You go back, and it keeps you coming back for more cheap dopamine hits. This is why checking social media first thing in the morning, going on your phone first thing in the morning, is one of the worst things that you can do. I mean, you prime your brain with the cheap dopamine. You set yourself up, you prime your brain. Like, for what you do first thing in the morning is so important. How you set your brain up for success is so important. How you start your day is how you spend your day, and how you spend your days is how you spend your life. So what you do first thing in the morning absolutely primes your brain and sets the filter that your brain has for your reality and primes it. And whatever you do first thing in the morning is absolutely where your attention is going to go for the rest of the day. So if you are checking your phone and spiking dopamine first thing in the morning and getting that sugar high first thing in the morning, guess what's going to happen? You're going to get that spike and your brain is going to keep craving to go back for more the entire day. This is why it's one of the worst things that you can do, to check your phone, check social media first thing in the morning. If you feel like you struggle to focus, if you feel like you are easily distracted, maybe you struggle to read, pay attention to the page, you get to the bottom, you just don't know what you just read, You find it really difficult to sit down and lock in. There's actually a very recent research study that I was just reading about the impacts of screen usage. And so it looked at people who have high screen time versus people who have low screen time. Now, what they found were a few things. And the first thing is that people who had high screen time, a large amount of time on their phones, they actually had decreased working memory capacity. This means that they were less able to hold information in their mind. Working memory is the ability to hold things in your mind. You're active in your memory. Things are active in your mind, right? Like if you're trying to remember a bunch of things at once, this is working memory. So they found that people who have a lot of screen time, they have lower working memory. They are less able to hold information in their mind. That's not the only thing they found. They also found that these people had less activity in their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This one really grinds my gears. And this one really gets me going because your prefrontal cortex is what makes you the boss. It is what makes you the CEO of your life. It is literally the boss of your brain. When I was in my PhD studying drug addiction, we studied impulse control and relapse. And guess what we were looking at? The prefrontal cortex. Because there was, there was some things going on in the prefrontal cortex that led, we thought, led you to be less able to control your impulses, which led you to relapse. The prefrontal cortex is so important for you being the human that you are. It is what makes us human. It is what makes us conscious creators of our lives. We are losing the ability to be the creator of our lives with— as screen time goes up, the ability to create your life goes down. The ability to focus your mind. Okay, the prefrontal cortex is also really important for focus and impulse control. Top-down control over yourself, regulating your emotions. Also really important for emotional regulation. They've also found that increased screen usage, increased phone time, social media time, it's leading to decreased emotional regulation, nervous system regulation. Executive functioning is the ability to sort of regulate yourself, monitor your thoughts, and regulate your emotions, focus your mind. We are losing the ability to do that with increased screen time. A lot of people nowadays say that they can't focus and that they struggle to focus. But what if what people have is really just well-practiced distraction? Now, the brain has this magical thing where it gets better at what you do more often. And so if you're constantly responding to that notification, if you're constantly picking up your phone, every time you, you sit down to focus, you're picking up your phone and you're allowing yourself to be distracted. Every time you give in to the distraction, you are practicing distraction. And every time you practice distraction, you get better at it because the brain brain strengthens the pathways that you repeatedly activate. Something that I always say is you are always practicing something. You're always activating some sort of pathways in the brain. Are you practicing the skill that you want to have, or are you practicing the skill that you don't? The brain doesn't know what you want versus what you don't want. It just gets better at whatever you repeat. If you feel like you're always tired, or you feel like you just don't wake up with a lot of energy, maybe you have brain fog, you just don't feel like excited and energized. It's probably the phone, especially if you are scrolling at night. If you are on your phone at night, you are doing so many things to your brain in the wrong direction. I just kind of wanna go through a few of the things that happen in your brain if you are on your phone at night. One, you are exposing your eyes, which are also a part of your brain, to blue light. So you're disrupting your sleep. You are just disrupting the quality of your sleep. Now, sleep. Is so important for so many different things. So many different things. One of the things that happens during sleep is that your dopamine receptors actually resensitize. And so if you wanna wake up feeling excited and motivated and like, hell yeah, it's gonna be a great productive day, you want your dopamine receptors to resensitize at night. To put it in super simple terms, you want your receptors to be as sensitive as possible because the more sensitive they are to dopamine, the better. And if you are scrolling at night, if you disrupt your sleep at night— now this isn't just about the phone and social media, this is also about binge-watching TV. It's about anything really that disrupts your sleep at night is going to disrupt this process of dopamine receptor resensitization, which will impact the way that you feel the next morning. Run this experiment tonight. Put your phone away and avoid your phone from like 3 to 4 PM on. If you're listening to this, after 4:00 PM, then just do it tomorrow. But put your phone away at like 3, 4:00 PM and don't go on your phone. Don't go on social media for the rest of the day. Just one day, try this experiment. Okay? You will wake up the next morning feeling different. You might not believe it, but the difference that just one evening makes— huge. Run the experiment tonight and then come back to the comments and let everybody else know how it went. That way the other people that are watching it can be like, okay, period. I'll, I'll run the experiment. But there is another really important part to this as well when it comes to the phone usage at night, and it has to do with reality creation. The seeds that you plant in your brain at night are the seeds that your brain ruminates on all night long. Research shows that you can learn in your sleep all night long as you sleep. Whatever your brain is replaying as you sleep is what gets saved into your memory. The seeds that you plant in your brain at night are just as important as the seeds that you plant when you first wake up in the morning. Now, just to give you a little bit of the neuroscience behind this, every night as you sleep, your brain does something called memory consolidation, where it moves events, emotions, different things that have happened throughout the day and things that are in your short-term memory. It consolidates to long-term memory. So these seeds that you plant right before you go to sleep at night, are the seeds that your brain waters all night long. This is especially important if the content that you are consuming at night is emotionally stimulating. If what you consume at night is making you laugh, could be making you happy, it could be making you sad, it could be making you angry, it could be making you compare yourself, or it could be fearmongering content or doomsday content. It could be just drama and people, you know, gossip or whatever it is. Those become the emotions that are available to your brain during sleep consolidation. So being intentional about the seeds that you plant right before you fall asleep is so important. This is why I have a very specific sort of nighttime routine. It's very, very simple, but really it is just about being very intentional and winding down the nervous system and regulating your nervous system for sleep. So, so powerful. It absolutely changes the way you wake up in the morning. Also, research has shown that your brain does learn in your sleep. They have done studies where they have actually had medical students, they played the information that was gonna be on the exam d— while they napped to one group, the other group didn't get it. And the group that heard it while they napped performed better on the exam. So your brain can learn in your sleep. I know a lot of this just gets like brushed under the rug, but this again is why it is so important to be intentional with the content that you consume before you fall asleep and the things that are going on while you sleep in your environment. All of this brings me to maybe the most important thing that I wanna talk about in this video, which is the algorithm. Your brain has an algorithm and your phone has an algorithm. Okay? Everybody is well aware of the phone's algorithm. Okay? Social media has an algorithm and it works astonishingly well and it works fast. I want you to be aware of that, right? I, I had an example of this happen recently where I commented on one of those videos to like, you know, comment this and we'll send you a link. And I commented on it and it was the type of content that I never usually engage with. It was just interesting. And so I commented and now all of a sudden my entire feed, my entire suggested is just all content on that topic. And I was like, whoa, whoa, I'm not that interested in this content. Like I just wanted that one recipe. Like I don't want all of this. And so it sort of smacked me in my, in my face in real time just how fast the algorithm changes, right? Like you engage with one type of post, and now all of a sudden you're getting so much content that is related to that type of post. You are always training your algorithm. Your algorithm is always learning from you based on what you engage with. Your brain also has an algorithm. Your brain is constantly filtering your reality and only showing you what aligns with your emotional state. Your focus, your mindset, your memories. We experience less than 1% of reality. I saw a title of a video on YouTube, actually, it was like a Big Think video, and it said the way that we experience reality can be compared to the way that a grasshopper experiences calculus. Grasshoppers don't comprehend calculus. We do not comprehend reality. We do not experience reality as it is. Every single second, 11 million bits of information arrive to the brain, and we experience around 40 to 60 bits of information per second. 10.99999 million bits of information per second are being filtered out. We do not experience reality as it is. We experience our own reality algorithm. And it is really, really important to acknowledge that the brain and our reality algorithm works very similarly to how the phone's algorithm works, where if we engage with something, we decide, oh, I want a red Jeep. Now all of a sudden red Jeeps are everywhere, all over the roads. One of my friends started playing padel recently, and all of a sudden now everywhere he goes, oh my God, that's that person, like, that's a padel place. This is about padel everywhere. He never talked about padel ever before. Now all of a sudden he's interested in it and it's showing up everywhere in his reality, and he's noticing it all over the place. Why? Because he engaged with it. He started to engage with it. This is why we spiral as well. You start focusing on a problem and all of a sudden your brain starts showing you all the reasons why it's a problem. Your algorithm is learning from what you're focused on and showing you more of that. The reason why I'm sharing this though is because eventually your social media algorithm and your brain algorithm start training each other, right? So we always think about how we are training the algorithm, like we, what we like and comment on. Becomes our algorithm, right? And we sort of train the algorithm and social media learns from us and shows us what we're interested in, what we're, what we engage with. But the algorithm also trains us. We become what we consume the same way what we eat, the foods we eat, we become our brain, our body absorbs our brain very much absorbs what we consume on social media. Everything. That we watch, that we hear, that we listen to, especially when it's repeated over and over again in these constant hits that social media is, we learn from that and the brain adjusts and adapts to that. And now all of a sudden our brain is being, is not teaching the algorithm, it is actually being modulated by our algorithm. I was working with a client recently and he was sharing with me his perspective on business and the way that he saw the market going, et cetera, et cetera. I felt like it was a little bit of a limited mindset, a little bit of a lack mindset. So I challenged him on it. I shared my perspective and he goes, I've never heard that perspective before. He had shared with me that a lot of the way that he thought was based on what he had seen on social media. The thing is, is that your algorithm shows you what matches your perspective. You train it initially with what you think, and then it trains you back. By showing you more of what it thinks you think. And now all of a sudden you think that's the way the world works. You think that's the way reality works, but it's not. It's just your little tunnel vision sliver of life. And this can be very harmful because we start to think that certain things are normal, right? We start to think like, oh, all men are bad, all women are bad, or dating sucks, the dating world sucks. Like, these are just some examples, but we start— economy sucks. Like, all these different things. Like, we start to believe all of the stories that we hear on social media, but the stories that we hear are based on us, and we start to think that this is the way that the world works, but it's not. It's the way that our world works, and it's social media just confirming your beliefs and giving you more to match what you think. And then you have conversations with real people and you realize, I've never heard that perspective before. And that is why it is so important to have conversations with real people because social media is not real life. I've been in the content creation space for years now. I have millions of followers across platforms and I have met so many creators in real life, like so, so, so, so, so many. And when I have deeper conversations with creators off camera, the conversations are so like different and deep and meaningful and we talk about things that you know, we are feeling that we don't see. And it can be a very isolating space as a content creator. And it's, it's very, very true that the world that we live in is just so much more complex and so much more nuanced than what social media usually offers to us. And, and this is where I wanna start leading into solutions because I don't think the solution here is to like throw away your phone, get a flip phone, delete social media forever. Although if these are things that you are feeling called to do, go for it, do it. I personally have worked with people before that they keep their regular phone with social media and all of that, but they leave it at home and then they just take their flip phone out when they are out of the house. And that can be great. Um, and so there are many different, there are many different solutions. There are also apps that I've personally used before that you can download that set limits on social media usage. So you can set timeframes that I'm only going to allow myself to go on these apps during these certain windows, maybe during like your lunch hour or whatever it is. That way you're not even allowed to go on it. Like, you try to click on it and it's literally blocked. Or maybe it forces you to take like 3 deep breaths so that way you are at least becoming consciously aware and it's not just like some habit that you're just like pulling the slot machine and you're not even thinking about it. Because I know it's real where you open up your phone and all of a sudden you're on social media and you don't even know how you got there because you didn't even mean to click it. And then you're sitting there asking yourself like, why? What did I get on my phone for? Like, I've had that happen myself before. Like, you're like, what did I even get on my phone for? And you have to sit and think about like what you got on your phone for? Or, you know, I— this is literally like one of my jobs, so I go on social media for things, and then all of a sudden I'm just like, wait, what did I get on social media for? And I'm realizing, yeah, I went to check this one thing. And so setting limits that make you mindful before you get on are so, so helpful. Back to the algorithm thing, because your algorithm absolutely trains your brain's algorithm, and your brain's algorithm determines the reality that you experience. Training your algorithm intentionally is so important. Like, Go on a closet cleanout, like start unfollowing people, like go on an unfollow spree, like unfollow people. Like if people, if, if there is content that does not resonate with you, that you don't want to be shaping your reality, unfollow them. And if you don't feel comfortable unfollowing them, like mute their accounts, you can do that. Another thing that is super helpful that I absolutely do is I actually reset my algorithm and this resets the content that is being shown to you. So that you don't get stuck in these spirals. Like, if you feel like you are stuck in a cycle, it might be the social media environment that you are in. Everybody talks about how important environment is for you, your brain, your personal development, your growth, your reality. Social media is an environment that so many of us spend so much time on, and so it is important to cultivate that space, that environment as well. So If you are feeling called to do it, reset your algorithm. There's a way to do that on Instagram. There are many different ways to do that. You can also reset the suggested content. You can also turn it off so that it no longer even suggests content to you. I personally just did this. I hate when the apps are like suggesting me content, like just show me the people that I'm following and I don't like want to see any other like content. Like I don't need to see things that are suggested. Like I don't, I don't want it. I don't want that. Also, just as a creative. As a content creator that I've been doing this for a long time, something that I have found is that it is really important to be offline. Like, it's very important to kind of live under a rock. And this is something that I've said for a long time, even before I was a content creator. I never really used social media. I actually didn't even have TikTok until, until I started posting. Like, I downloaded the app just to post. So I never really was using the apps. And I think that that actually benefits me and it benefits my content because I'm I'm not like trying to replicate anybody else. In this day and age, if you are a content creator, you have to be original. Like you have to be the most you, you that you can possibly be. And if you are constantly consuming everybody else's content, like your content just by default is gonna be shaped by that. And there's absolutely no problem with getting inspiration from other people. Like being inspired by other people is great, but It is, it is really important to have your own perspective. And, and also it, that's really important for finding yourself, your own unique perspective and view and who you really are. If you are constantly consuming content that is other people's, you're constantly consuming other people's life. Like, how are you gonna get quiet enough to know your own life? How are you gonna get quiet enough to know yourself on a deep level? I don't think that it's possible to do that. It is really, really important to spend time with yourself, to be bored. Like, boredom is so important. Processing time is so important. Like, laying down and just staring up at your ceiling fan and just giving yourself time to do that is so important. Recognize that your attention on social media is absolutely the product. You are the product. Your attention is being monetized. They are literally calling it the attention economy. They're not even calling it the creator economy anymore. They're calling it the attention economy. It's whoever can get more attention. The way to take control back over your life is to take your attention back. So take it back. Wake up tomorrow morning and do a fire morning routine. Get outside, go out into the sunlight, touch some grass, meditate, move your body. But wake up tomorrow morning and do a fire morning routine. Take your attention and give it to yourself. Prime your brain for what you want to see in reality. Maybe you'll even journal or do something that brings you joy. Go for a walk without your phone. Meditate. Journal. Give yourself the space to have your own thoughts again, not thoughts that are shaped by your algorithm or social media. Something that I have noticed being off of social media is when these trends happen where there are different sayings and all of a sudden people are like, oh, I'm crashing out. And it's like all these sayings and it's like, That isn't your thought. Recognize that you are predicting and creating your reality based on a phrase that's going viral right now that you shouldn't want to be saying. Like, you don't want your brain predicting a crash out. Like, what? You, you don't wanna use that phrase. Your words are super powerful. So claim your thoughts back to yourself. And the only way to do that is to take space to think for yourself again. That's how your calling will find you. It's how your purpose finds you. It's how you becoming yourself finds you. And, and it's also how you gain your freedom back and you get to know what you really want, not based on this like rat race, constant do more, have more, chase more, but like what you really want, which is powerful, really freeing, really regulating. A thought that I want to leave you with for this video is that the real cost of constantly being on your phone on social media is not just the loss of time, which you absolutely do lose a lot of time. The real cost is the person that you are training your brain to become. Authenticity is absolutely the most magnetic energy, and the way to be the most you, you can possibly be is not to be constantly training yourself on the algorithm, on other people, on other content, on now like AI content. Like the way to become the person that you are meant to become is to spend more time with yourself. Spend more time in silence, spend more time journaling, meditating, going for walks, doing the things that make you happy, that bring you joy, that make you feel fulfilled. And if you made it all the way to the end, I just want you to know that I'm proud of you and that the little kid version of you would be proud of you and that you can do absolutely anything you set your mind to. So take control of your mind back. I believe in you. You got this. And if you are interested in coming to a masterclass that I am hosting all about the neuroscience of manifestation, reprogramming your subconscious mind, taking your power back, and creating the life that you really want to live. Check out the link in the description below because that is where you're going to RSVP to save your seat in my next live free class. Highly recommend it. They are amazing. They always make everybody feel super fired up, super energized. I'm also going on tour. It's gonna be incredible. And so the link in the description to RSVP for your city is gonna be in the description as well. Thank you so much for watching. I appreciate you. I'm sending you so much love. And until the next video, I wish you nothing but an abundance of blessings. Bye!
