🧠 You Might Be Wasting 60 Days A Year: Reclaim Your Dopamine Sensitivity Now!
You've moved from a single flat white before work to needing three long blacks before 11am just to function and ward off that withdrawal headache. This is tolerance, where your body becomes so accustomed to a substance (like caffeine) that it decreases its effectiveness. The same mechanism applies to your dopamine.
We live in a dopamine-saturated world where programmers and marketers engineer small hits of pleasure into every interaction and keep your eyes glued on their product. Globally, 210 million people are addicted to social media. Gen Z spends 4-4.5 hours daily on platforms like TikTok and Instagram and over 40 hours a week on their phones. And the research has shown this addiction has dramatic affects on our dopamine physiology (not in a good way).
The effect? Dopamine desensitisation. Your brain becomes so accustomed to constant stimulation that the next time you need to concentrate for an extended period, you feel the itch to check something or fire off emails. You need that quick dopamine fix.
It's time to reclaim your dopamine sensitivity so you experience less distraction when concentrating and amplify dopamine's effect when it's needed.
📵 Reduce Social Media and News Consumption
- Set time restrictions on social media and news apps to prevent mindless scrolling
- Use your phone's digital wellbeing functions and aim for less than two hours total screen time daily
- Apply the same limits on your computer for website equivalents
This isn't about elimination, it's about intentional engagement.
However it is worth noting that high levels (daily) of social media usage is linked with impaired emotional regulation, reduced capacity for attention, altered reward signalling, worse everyday memory, lower prosocial behaviour, lower self-control, and reduced executive function. So you might want to consider dropping it all together for a bit.
💤 Embrace Boredom
The next time you're queuing somewhere, waiting for your coffee, or going for a walk, resist the urge to reach for your phone. Sit with the boredom. Research shows it supports creativity, improves task engagement and emotional regulation, enables introspection, and activates the default mode network.
💪 Train Your Concentration Muscle
Concentration is trainable, like muscular strength. But here's the problem: generative AI, home automation, and book summaries eliminate the mental resistance that builds attentional capacity. The result? Cognitive atrophy.
If you spent a year immobilised, your legs wouldn't forget how to walk, but standing would be excruciating. Similarly, your brain hasn't forgotten how to focus deeply, it's just lost the strength to sustain it.
The antidote? Schedule mental workouts. Plan extended meditation sessions, read long-form analysis and books, write or journal for sustained periods. Increase your reps over time to build cognitive muscle.
In a world of hyper-scattered focus and hustle culture's ‘busyness’, the ability to concentrate deeply is a powerful competitive edge.
I'd love to know, check your phone, what's your daily screen time?