Why don't we feel our life interesting and why we are always unhappy with what we have. We try to find pleasure outside so that we can be busy with what we are doing or feel that we are occupied with something. We are always covered with screens mostly in this pandemic we have faced extreme situations where people have been working from home and theirs's an increase in mental health issues as we are so much intensified with the wrong things around us. In this post, we are going to look at how overstimulation of these pleasures is ruining our life.
The extreme dopamine burst
Let's consider an example you are done with all your work for the day and then we have some time until dinner so what is the first thing you do? You see your phone and you pick it up and scroll some social media or watch some random recommended YouTube videos. Another thing which can happen is you turn on your TV and watch some sitcoms. So why we are doing these things instantly as we switch off from work. The answer is we have faced extreme stimulation. We get the dopamine hit when you see something arousing or interesting which when you experience your brain tells you to repeat it again so that you will get that feeling again. It also applies to junk food, once you eat it you find that thing more interesting as compared to salads or leafy vegetables. Also, the junk food packets are so attractive with those colourful and shiny images on the chips packet. This thing keeps happening whenever you feel that nothing is interesting to do. Your brain gets rewired to that experience you had when you watched the TV the whole night and you go back to that experience unknowingly.
No room for boredom Imagine you and your friend decided to meet at a café you reached the café before your friend and he calls you and says that he is going to be 5min late. The immediate moment after the call you will be going through your phone and you will do so until your friend arrives. The thing is we are so much stimulated by these screens and devices that whenever we find some free time we get these rectangles out of our pocket so that we can give attention to something. You can even notice this kind of behaviour in a subway or a bus. Well, I am not telling you that I am not the one who doesn't do it but yes I try to avoid situations where theirs's no need to get your phone out. Until I am facing some social anxiety. So our brain has never experienced boredom because we are always "busy" with something in front of our face every time we are awake. So whenever you find these moments where there is no need to get engrossed in the devices try to avoid these mental candies and accept some boredom. It's weird but it is necessary because we are getting too much into the super-normal stimuli. We need to bring our mind back to normal stimuli where the dopamine hits and you feel amazed and not neutral after the dopamine hit.
Bonding
Nowadays we bond with our social media friends more than meeting each other face to face and having a talk. Our brains haven't changed too much as compared to our ancestors. But the environment around us has changed upside down. We still have that kind of mindset which our stone-age ancestors had when they saw an animal or a new thing. Whenever we see something interesting we get that stimulation to explore it but once we use it we don't bother more about it. In the modern age, we are connecting to people in the other part of the world just because of the internet but it turns out that our bonding has suffered a lot. We should instead try to build relationships offline rather than online. We have overloaded our minds with this excessive heavy backpack of stimulation which has disorganized our mental ability to enjoy things. We just want everything right now we have lost patience and created a world where you get everything you want without spending much energy.
Overstimulation is really ruining our life but we cannot stop it either but we can balance it by doing some slow-paced work or taking a pause and just think what is life worth and whether the thing you are doing is adding value to your life?
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