Your Phone Changes Your Brain: What Happens When You Try to Quit

The average American touches their phone 2,600 times per day, and this constant scrolling has altered the neurology of our brains. What happens when you try to quit your phone? After just one hour of quitting, you have likely tried to pick up your phone three to four times because the average person picks up their phone 52 times per day. After 12 hours of quitting, you may start to feel anxious as not checking your phone actually releases the stress hormone cortisol.

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This is due to how your phone changes these three neural pathways in your brain.

They are activated when anticipating or experiencing a reward. Your phone's notifications, text messages, or Instagram story updates all act as many rewards to your brain and physically change how these pathways work. In the new absence of your phone, cortisol is released because when you're endlessly scrolling or using social media, the positive social interactions reward the brain and cause constant firing. This causes a release of dopamine along these pathways in response to your phone's constant stimulus.

Every notification, every text message, every sexy photo of someone on Instagram acts as a mini-reward that you now associate with picking up your phone, and these little associations become stronger and stronger in the noggin until you're just constantly picking up your phone. After 12 hours of quitting, you are no longer checking your phone. This lack of stimulus that you're used to in your brain causes a stress response, and you start to feel anxious.

After 24 hours of quitting, one survey found that people began to experience FOMO (fear of missing out)

Which led to increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, and more anxiety. Other people had increased anxiety, but they couldn't exactly explain why. It wasn't just because of FOMO, for example, but it is likely due to the fact that these tech companies have actually hijacked our brains using their reward prediction error encoding of our noggin.

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Tech companies have studied these neuronal concepts in order to keep you using their products. When you get a reward without a cue, you keep behaviors. When you anticipate a reward and it gets satisfied, you keep behaviors. When you anticipate a good reward but it's worse than expected, you change a behavior and don't want to do it again. This is all linked to our human evolution ability to survive. We predict our yummy yummy food, the yummy yummy food gives us health, we learn the behavior, we continue to eat.

But when applying this to our phone, we often can't predict what is going to happen when we check our phone.

With notifications, likes, and communication, we are mostly always rewarded by checking it, making us learn to constantly check our phone. Also, since checking your phone is such a low-cost effort, you expect small rewards and are mostly satisfied, so you continue the behavior of checking your phone. The hijacking of these neuronal pathways means you have strong incentives to check your phone over and over again.

Now that you've quit your phone, the stimulus is removed, and that actually leads to increased anxiety.

Day three of quitting is when most people start to feel the phantom vibration or phantom ringing of their cell phone that is no longer there. This is when quitting your phone starts to feel like a horror movie. But day three of quitting is when some good things start to happen because you may begin to be rewarded by your friends, family, and lover because you're actually not paying attention to your phone.

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You are no longer fubbing, which is snubbing your loved ones for your phone. One study had participants view an animation pretending to be with a sexual partner. The difference in behavior between the two animations highlights the impact of technology on human behavior. The animation that checked their phone throughout the conversation may have missed out on important details or social cues from their partner. On the other hand, the animation that did not check their phone was able to fully engage with their partner and likely had a more fulfilling conversation. This scenario is a common occurrence in our daily lives, as technology has become an integral part of our existence. While it has its benefits, it's important to be mindful of how much we use it and how it affects our interactions with others.

In conclusion, our dependence on smartphones has become increasingly apparent, especially in social situations. The urge to check our phones frequently has become an automatic behavior for many, and it can negatively impact our personal and professional relationships. It is important to be mindful of our phone usage and to make a conscious effort to limit it, particularly in situations where it can be seen as disrespectful or distracting. By doing so, we can improve our interactions with others and enjoy more meaningful connections in our daily lives. Ultimately, the power lies with us to choose when and how we use our phones, and we should strive to use them in a way that enhances rather than detracts from our social experiences.