College is challenging. From quizzes to labs, coursework can take a lot out of you.
One thing that many students, including myself, struggle with is focusing for long periods of time. Lectures that last for two to three hours are extremely challenging to sit through without checking your phone multiple times.
But why is it so hard? Why can’t we focus on one topic for several hours the way our ancestors could?
The answer to those questions is the smartphone—more specifically, how the smartphone affects our brains.
Most of you are probably familiar with dopamine, the reward center of the brain that controls pleasure. Our brains evolved to produce dopamine so that we would have a reward—and, thus, motivation—when we accomplish important, healthy tasks. The problem we’ve run into in modern society is that dopamine is extremely easy to come by.
From TikTok to Tinder, we’re flooded with an incredible amount of pleasure and novelty every time we go on our phones.
Apps, video games, and internet pornography are all examples of what I will call “cheap dopamine.” Cheap dopamine can be a source of infinite pleasure. But there is no pleasure without pain.
Modern technology tricks our brains into releasing a massive amount of cheap dopamine whenever we want. This rewards us like we accomplished something when all we did was sit in front of a screen.
Most of the unhealthy habits that produce these incredible amounts of dopamine didn’t exist 50-plus years ago. The levels of dopamine produced in your brain when you sit on your phone watching endless TikToks and hitting your watermelon-flavoured dab pen are so unnaturally high that when you try to do an activity with your loved ones or go to the gym it doesn’t make you feel good the way it’s designed to.
Your dopamine receptors are fried and you need stronger and stronger hits to simply return to baseline.
That’s why you can’t sit through a long lecture. There’s no instant reward associated with going to class, no hit of dopamine for taking notes.
In this column I identified and explained a massive issue that affects almost everyone in our generation.
Make sure to check out the next issue, where I will share actionable advice to address this problem.