Over the past few months, my social media feed has been taken over by so-called self-improvement influencers. These creators center their entire online presence around advising on ways of bettering oneself. From fitness to diet and even to artistic processes, there are a myriad of influencers whose entire brand is helping others reach their full potential. While transformational life content isn’t particularly new or novel — think ’80s Richard Simmons tapes — I have been noticing a rise in a new type of self-help guru: the cognitive wellness influencer.
According to the National Institutes of Health, cognitive wellness, or as I like to call it, brain health, is the upkeep of the ability to think, learn and remember clearly. The influencers I’ve come across in this niche range from seasoned brain surgeons to gym rats with an interest in brain-maxing. Their content varies based on their unique audiences, but a constant practice I kept seeing recommended by nearly every one of these influencers was something called dopamine detoxing.
WebMD defines dopamine as “a hormone and a type of neurotransmitter, or chemical messenger, made in your brain.” Dopamine is released in the brain anytime you do an activity that gives you pleasure, motivation or reward. Activities like exercise and reading are balanced dopamine activities, wherein a moderate amount of dopamine is released in your brain. However, activities like social media scrolling and eating junk food are high-dopamine activities, causing dopamine releases to spike in your brain.
Constant high spikes of dopamine in the brain can lead to someone preferring instant gratification over activities that provide benefits long-term. If one’s brain becomes reliant on high-dopamine activities, it becomes difficult for the brain to focus while reading, studying or even just being around others. A study by Penn State University found that Americans check their phones 52.9 times a day on average. According to the screen-time function on my phone, I check mine more than 100 times a day on average. My parents did always tell me I was above average!
The influencers on my evil, dopamine-spiking phone had me convinced, and they all seemed to agree that constant cell-phone use was the worst offender of dopamine spiking. So, in the interest of re-regulating my dopamine system, I set off to ditch my phone for a week. I chose to conduct this experiment during midterm week, the week before February Break, when focus is currency to college students. The next paragraphs chronicle my experience as a phone-free midterms madman.
The plan for my experiment was simple. I would leave my phone in my room during the day and use my laptop to text only if necessary. Furthermore, I would use my computer solely for academic work and avoid social media. For safety, I took my phone with me anytime I went somewhere without my computer. I set my alarms on my phone in advance for the week, so I had no need to access it for that purpose. With these guidelines in place, I began.
I woke up Monday morning with a vengeance. I was to take back all the time my phone had stolen from me. When my alarm went off, I didn’t pick up my phone and check my text messages. No! I got out of bed, put on my Crocs and went straight to the shower. After only about 30 minutes of being awake, I noticed that I did not feel as tired. I noticed this for every morning I was phone-free, and according to science, there is a reason for this.
The Harvard Division of Sleep Medicine reports that as you wake, your brain transitions through a series of electrical patterns, called brainwaves, that help the brain go from asleep to fully alert. The transition from delta waves (waking up slowly) to beta waves (fully awake) takes the brain about half an hour, and using your phone during that period can disrupt your brain’s natural awakening process. In just 30 minutes of not using my phone in the morning, I already felt more focused.
Additionally, I found that because I wasn’t using my phone, my default became to direct my attention to the work at hand. Each day, I found it increasingly easier to park myself in front of a library window and get work done. My brain still wanted dopamine, and after only a few minutes of stalling, I began to feel it was easy to focus and fully engage. Not using my phone didn’t make it easier to motivate myself to do work per se, but it did extract some enjoyment from the learning I was doing, which in turn made me feel more apt to complete my tasks.
By the end of the week, I had actually completed all the essays and studying needed for my midterms without having to pull an all-nighter. On Friday, I genuinely felt that I had discovered some secret hack to getting work done, but in reality, I had just removed distractions and allowed myself to enter deep work periods. While my experiment is methodologically questionable, I do feel more cognizant of the way I’m using my phone and how it’s affecting my dopamine system and brain health as a whole.
Overall, I walk away from my phone-free experiment with the confidence of knowing that I am fully capable of limiting my phone usage. Besides social media, there wasn’t anything I found myself unable to do without my phone. Many of the archaic ways we used to do things, that have since been compacted by the convenience of the smartphone, were even enjoyable. For example, I listened to music on a portable CD player for the first time, and with some borrowed encouragement from my professor, Kevin Finch, I felt cool in the process of doing so.
I recommend everyone take the time to detox from their phone and their technology. As college students, we are constantly looking for ways to motivate ourselves to get our work done. While motivation is a highly individual concept, I do not doubt that everyone would benefit from fewer distractions and more balanced dopamine releases. Our brains already have a natural, effective way of rewarding us for doing hard things. We owe it to ourselves to give our brains a fighting chance in the war against artificial stimuli.
