Instant Dopamine

Today I tried to put my cellphone in my backpack, where I cannot reach immediately. From 8 am I started to have the urge to check notifications, for the Screen Time was automatically unlocked at 8. However, I resisted it. It was not until 10 am that I first checked my phone because I needed an internet connection to make a presentation.

I can’t help but wonder why we’ll have the desire to randomly reach for our phones and keep scrolling it. It’s kind of hard to resist. Then, I suddenly realized that our behavior is trying to seek for a sense of satisfaction. Whether it’s scrolling through social media, playing video games, or watching short-form videos. These activities take little effort but instantly give you a generous amount of satisfaction. More accurately, it’s a behavior seeking for what I called “instant dopamine”.

When we feel boredom, most people nowadays choose to pick out their phone on default. Because it immediately relieve boredom, even gives you reward of dopamine. As time goes by, this habit reinforces into your daily life. Therefore, whenever you feel bored, you will just pick up your phone.

Have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to start to do something? Bear with me, it’s relatable. - Starting anything meaningful takes so much more effort than simply scrolling Instagram. If we make no progress on things we value, we naturally won’t receive any satisfaction.

This leads to a serious problem – we’re actively avoiding doing things that really matters to our life. What makes this fact more unnoticeable is that the graph of progress v.s. effort we put in is not simply linear. The graph starts slow at the beginning, which means it takes time and effort to initiate important tasks. However, once you get through a certain threshold, the result will grow dramatically, which brings you true satisfaction that earned from your hard work. And it’s genuinely much happier than scrolling on Twitter.

In conclusion, we should try to avoid to reaward our brain with “instant dopamine” like watching short-form contents. Instead, we should invest our precious attention and time into tasks that creates the most value. Like the definition of deep work from “Deep Work” by Cal Newport.

"Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”

That’s the ultimate goal we should try to reach.