Hello and welcome to another video.
Its almost impossible to come across someone who doesn’t have a social media account.
it become a necessity in todays world.
For most of us, its our primary source of information, connections and entertainment.
We might not have realised it but there are a lot of things have changed in our life Since
we have started using social media, primarily because of its affect on our brain.
Of course it has its own pros and cons but here on this video we will focus on the idea
of how social media is changing your brain.
So hit that subscribe button and the bell besides it and lets jump in.
social media is destroying your most valuable skill - attention
Social media companies are literally spending billions of dollars every single year just
to find more creative ways to make you spend more time on their site, because The more
time you spend on their site, the more money they make!
But unfortunately, that comes at a cost of hurting your brain in a way that you might
not have realised.
There is something in your brain thats called dopamine, its a little nuetrasmitter that
responsible for your motivation, it controls your reward system.
Everything we do is because of this dopamine receptor, that part of your brain realises
the reward and craves for it until you get that reward.
So it increases every time you get a reward and then comes back to its normal level after
that.
Drugs for example significantly increase your dopamine level, up to 400 if you take cocain.
And the reason we get addicted to them is because after boosting our dopamine many times
to that level, our new average becomes much higher, so the only thing we will be motivated
to do is what will increase our dopamine above that average.
Thats why you find most drug addicts loosing interesting in hobbies, socializing, and everything
else because most of what we do daily raises our dopamine level to less that 200, which
is lower than the average of a drug addict.
Thats why drug addicts are comfortable even to live in streets as long as they get that
dopamine boost from a drug.
And surprisingly, social media has the exact same effect, of course it doesn’t increases
your dopamine to 400 but slightly lower than that.
Every time you get a notification on your phone, your dopamine level spikes, and thats
why, you straight away check your phone to see whats there.
Or when you are looking into you news feed for example, you keep scrolling down, because
your brain is anticipating a reward, the next post might be something you like, something
that you might enjoy, thats the reward that your brain is expecting, thats why you keep
scrolling.
And what happens overtime is that, you new average of dopamine becomes higher than the
normal and you find yourself every 5 minutes checking your Facebook for example, just to
see if there is something new.
So it gets difficult for you to stay concentrated doing something productive because other things
just don’t spike your dopamine level like social media.
In other words, social media destroying your most valuable skill - which is your ability
to stay focused.
2.
And that drives us to the second point - It damages you memory
The problem isn’t just about struggling to stay focused because of social media but
rather even these little minutes in between when we try to do something productive becomes
extremely ineffective.
Lets for example you want to read book, that information first goes to your short term
memory and then after a while, especially when you sleep, it transfers into your long
term memory, thats how learning actually happens.
But when you are constantly distracted by social media, this process becomes a mess.
because once you learn something, it straight gets replaced with what you read on social
media, so even if you spend an hour studying or reading, that information doesn’t properly
gets stored in your long term memory.
In other words, you just waited your time.
I guess you are fed up already of listening how social media ruining up your brain and
you want to know what can you do about it?
The first thing you want to do is to bring down your dopamine average to its normal level
so actives such as reading a book, going to a gym or simply going out with friends will
start appearing interesting enough to your brain.
The best solution is of course to delete all of your social media apps, but its almost
impossible to live without them because for some of us its the main tool to connect with
others.
But try at least to quite it for couple of weeks until you get rid of your addiction
and then come back to it, but this time you will be able to control yourself since you
are no longer addicted.
But if you can’t, at least whenever you are working, just turn off your wife if you
don’t really need or as I prefer to do it is to keep my phone far away from my table,
or used apps such as stay focused!
Just keep in mind that in the first couple of days or more that will be very difficult
to restrain yourself but then it gets easier.
Another thing I found very helpful is meditation, is to keep everything aside and try to focus
on one thing for as long as you can.
Start with 5 minutes and then go up to half and hour if you can, that will strengthen
your attention and will give you the willpower to stay focused even when your phone is vibrating
with a notification.
Thats all for today, hit that like button if you have enjoyed this video.
Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one!