Social Media, Dopamine, and Stress: Converging Pathways – Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science

The more we activate that intense pleasure response on social media, Lembke says, the more we crave it. The repetitive action becomes less exciting and we end up needing more to give us the same pleasure we experienced with a lesser amount before. Harris likened social media to a slot machine — we don’t know if we’re going to have positive interact... See more

“The problem with things that release a lot of dopamine all at once is that our brains have to compensate. But this is really the key point — our brains don’t just then bring our dopamine firing back to baseline level,” she said. “It actually pushes dopamine levels below baseline. We go into a dopamine deficit state. That’s the way the brain restor... See more

Smartphones provide a nearly endless stream of potential dopamine: a ‘positive social interaction’, or something resembling it, is always but a swipe away. As a result, we’re often mindlessly reaching for our phones without really knowing why and, if we cannot find our phone, we may feel a pang of anxiety.When we sit down to work, our brains don’t ... See more

past, we’d pick up a self-help book or seek out a therapist, who might or might not address our nutritional deficiencies. These approaches might have been fine a decade ago, before the major changes to our environment and food supply, light pollution, and the psychological impact of social media began affecting our daily behavior. However, our preh

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Like Facebook, its more successful and more evil older brother, Twitter is built around dopamine loops. It encourages behaviors that are mostly mindless and driven by emotional triggers.