Dopamine deficit state

When you scroll shorts, each time you swipe it causes spikes of dopamine. Rapid and continuous dopamine spikes causes your brain to have to work extra hard to down-regulate your dopamine receptors. So when you stop, your dopamine levels may drop way below baseline levels for a while. This dopamine deficit state often feels like a hangover, hollow, empty, and restless. Over time, the brain’s reward system has adapted to frequent, high-intensity stimulation, making ordinary activities temporarily feel less rewarding.

Worse, high stimulation on junk media with zero meaning and usefulness doesn’t bring any real world fulfilment and satisfaction, unlike say, finishing a project, or even hunting your dinner. So it feels like just massive wasted time. Plus if you were scrolling to escape some emotions like stress, boredom or anxiety, all those emotions flood back in when you stop.

When all these happen, you reach out for your phone again to escape, to feel the dopamine hits again. Vicious cycle repeats.

Burnout aside, this could be why I’ve been feeling like motivation had been hard to muster recently. Everything feels vacuous and distant.

Perhaps it’s just an off-balanced baseline, and means a time for a reset.