A Little Dopamine, As a Treat

Self-medicating with the internet

For years, I’ve had the same behavioral pattern at work. I’ll finish a mentally taxing task — something like grading a set of papers — and then give myself a little break. Occasionally, I’ll get up from my chair and take a little walk, but this is not usually the case. Most of the time, I stay glued to my laptop screen. It’s a cognitive break, not a physical one.

I’ll usually fire up a social media site and scroll mindlessly for a few minutes. Other times, I’ll flip over to Gmail and skim through my emails. I might check my Medium stats and notifications. I might even read some real journalism at the New York Times… or maybe just do the Wordle. I’ll futz about on the internet for about 15 minutes and then take a deep breath and get back to work.

I find myself needing to do this when I’m about to start a difficult task, too — like I’ve got to warm up my brain by doing a little mindless scrolling on the internet.

I usually feel virtuous about visiting the news websites — I’m reading high-level journalism! — but, at least when I’m in break mode, I don’t actually read much of anything. I’ll peruse some headlines, click on the interesting ones, and skim the first couple of paragraphs of the article. Often, I will “read” an article, close the tab, and realize that I haven’t digested a single thing from it.

No matter what I’m doing on my laptop — social media, email, news — there’s one constant: I’m letting my attention flit around. I’m swimming in a sea of fragmentary information, digesting very little of it. My attention is wandering. Or maybe wandering is the wrong way to put it — it’s more like my attention is both dulled and hyperactive, zipping around from one informational tidbit to another while failing to digest any of it.

I’ve started to notice my physiological reaction when I take my little cognitive breaks. When I switch from real work to break mode, I often let a big breath out and relax my shoulders. Phew! It feels good!

I used to think of these little cognitive breaks as giving my attention a rest, and maybe that’s part of it. But it doesn’t feel like I’m resting. I think I’m really doing something else.

I think I’m giving myself a little dopamine, as a treat.

When I mess around on the internet, what I’m really doing is enjoying a “variable reward schedule.” What’s a variable reward schedule, you ask? Trevor Haynes of Harvard Medical School puts it this way:

Variable reward schedules were introduced by psychologist B.F. Skinner in the 1930’s. In his experiments, he found that mice respond most frequently to reward-associated stimuli when the reward was administered after a varying number of responses, precluding the animal’s ability to predict when they would be rewarded. Humans are no different; if we perceive a reward to be delivered at random, and if checking for the reward comes at little cost, we end up checking habitually (e.g. gambling addiction). If you pay attention, you might find yourself checking your phone at the slightest feeling of boredom, purely out of habit. Programmers work very hard behind the screens to keep you doing exactly that.*

So, essentially, I’m pulling a slot-machine handle over and over. Maybe Gmail will give me something interesting. Maybe social media will serve me a funny video. Maybe I’ll check Medium and see that somebody has said something nice about one of my posts.

When our brains receive positive stimuli — a smiling face, a funny joke, a kind gesture — they release a little dopamine, a hormone that’s associated with pleasure and reward. Dopamine is not a bad chemical. Our brains release dopamine when we eat chocolate and have sex, and the dopamine is part of what makes those experiences enjoyable.

But, if we engage in a variable-reward activity repeatedly, our brains learn to associate the activity itself with the potential reward. Frequent slot machine players actually get a little hit of dopamine every time they pull the lever to watch the little wheels turn in the machine. It doesn’t matter if they win; the act of gambling feels good. The same goes for social media scrolling. Whether or not I find anything rewarding, my brain treats itself to a little bit of pleasure hormone every time I scroll.

I’ve long thought of my little breaks as attentional rest, but it might make more sense to think of them as self-medication. I’m rewarding myself for 45 minutes of grading papers by giving myself a hit of the good stuff.

I don’t think I’m the only one who does this. I teach at a high school, and it’s always interesting to watch my students’ behavior in between classes. After a long period of science or history, most of my students can’t even make it out of the classroom door before they whip out their phones. At lunch, the one long respite they get from developing their brains all day long, many of them sit around tables, looking at their phones in parallel, scrolling through TikTok and Instagram or playing video games.

Are the kids relaxing, or are they self-medicating? Are they giving themselves a little hit of the molecule they’ve become reliant on from a very young age?

The obvious next question is — So what? Why is it so bad for people to treat themselves to a little bit of pleasure in the middle of a difficult day?

Anna Lembke, the head of a Stanford addiction clinic and author of Dopamine Nation, says that there are potential problems.

The first issue is that becoming too reliant on dopamine means that we spend a lot of our cognitive energy in our limbic brain, a center related to emotions, and less in the parts of the brain that actually solve problems and plan for the future. If we get a lot of our dopamine from digital distractions, we learn to escape problems by sinking into our screens rather than addressing them.

The second is that every high comes with a low. When I treat myself to 15 minutes of mindless scrolling, I’m bathing my brain in dopamine. It feels good! But after I stop scrolling, my brain corrects itself. I get a dopamine deficit, and I feel like crap. The only way to solve the problem is to treat myself to more of the good stuff, but the more we do so, the less effective the hits become.

Lembke argues that the dopamine we get from internet use has incredible potential for addiction because there’s an unlimited supply. The meth addict is limited by time and money, but there’s always more Instagram.

So what should we do, then?

It’s especially important to think about the effect of all this on kids.

Think about the students in the school cafeteria, all sitting around the table staring at their phones. If we look at their technology use as an attentional issue, it’s problematic but defensible — they’ve had a hard morning; they deserve to take a break! But if we reframe it as self-medication, it looks more harmful. Lembke says that:

The coping strategies that we learn in our childhood and adolescent years are the ones that get hardwired into the brain. Likewise, substances that we may use or coping behaviors that are maladaptive that we may use also get then deeply embedded into our neurological framework such that potentially it may be that much more difficult later in adulthood to change those behaviors, which is why it’s so important to make sure that we protect our kids and try to intervene early when kids are showing signs and symptoms of maladaptive consumption.

More than 40% of American kids have a smartphone by age 10, and the vast majority have one by age 12. We’re giving these kids incredibly powerful dopamine-dispensing devices at a very young age. We often worry, understandably, about the content kids might have access to on the internet. We focus on keeping them away from pornography and social cruelty.

But what if the teen mental health epidemic is also a function of the fact that kids are learning to dose themselves with dopamine all the time? They’re becoming addicted to a pleasure hormone — no wonder they want to sink back into their phones at the first opportunity.

And it’s not just the kids, of course. Ever since I’ve reframed my little breaks as self-medication, I’ve been more mindful of them. I would hesitate to self-medicate in other ways at work, after all (I think my boss would frown on my sipping a little whiskey every time I knock out a stack of quizzes).

I’m trying to take actual breaks now — ones where I actually get up from my chair and divert my gaze from the screen. I try to talk to somebody or take a walk. But, honestly, the pull of the internet is pretty strong, and I still find myself scrolling mindlessly all too often. I’m still giving myself a little dopamine, as a treat.

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